Bear Grease - Ep. 226: Operation Russian Snag

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

By the 2000’s, the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation had paddlefish poaching largely under control, but it wasn’t long before a new group of poachers hit the scene. In this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, Clay Newcomb continues his conversation with retired Oklahoma game warden, Jeff Brown, as he recounts the details of “Operation Russian Snag,” and the lengths that this group went to in order to acquire paddlefish caviar. Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. It was almost overnight. So they just showed up. They just showed up. Were y'all immediately suspicious of that?

Yeah. On the last episode of Bear Greece, we learned about the black market caviar trade in the United States and how the number one source is the American paddlefish, an ancient beast, older than the dinosaurs that can reach up to 160 pounds, and females often produce up to 20% of their brinketheas. body weight in black eggs, almost worth their weight in gold. We've learned about how the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife created a controversial program

that allowed anglers to donate their eggs to the state. Then caviar was made and sold on the legal market to raise money for conservation, and it raised over $10 million. But this week, we're transitioning in the chronology of the caviar black market, and the players were completely shocking to me. It was none other than the Russians. This is a wild story about the cultural value of caviar and what some people were willing to do to get it. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. And I want to let you know that soon you'll be able to watch video. That's right, video of the Bear Grease Render podcast, which is

our every other week podcast where we dissect the actual Bear Gris. I know it's confusing. All this you'll be able to see on meat eater's new YouTube channel with just podcasts on it. Brent will be there in his overalls and I'll probably be wearing a coon skin cap. Probably even have some music too. It's going to be a lot of fun. On to the episode. They knew we were watching them.

We knew they were watching us. And we'd go down and sit down on the bank and just talk to them. You know, they're jolly people, a lot of them. It's just, hey, man. They wanted them paddlefish eggs. They wanted that caviar at all cost. And it's kind of like, yeah, we're doing it. Catch us if you can.

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. On November 27, 1985, America's awareness of the Cold War with the then-Soviet Union reached an all-time high after almost 40 years of jockeying for global power in this ideological and geopolitical struggle.

That November date was the release of a hit. box office movie. Because of the long jab of the Russian. Rocky 4 starred Sylvester Stallone as Rocky. The virtuous, simple, tough as nails, American hero pitted against the villainous antagonist. Actor Hans Lundgren planned the tall, ridiculously good-looking, and jacked Russian boxer Ivan Drago, who had killed Apollo Creed. It was an epic battle portrayed as,

good versus evil, especially if you lived in America. He's not only fighting what appears to be an invincible opponent. He's also fighting a very hostile crowd. If you recall, Rocky had agreed to fight the Russian in Moscow. Adrian, Rocky's wife, knew that that was a mistake, and most of us did too. The viewer spends most of the film anxious about Rocky fighting this guy in Russia, wondering how he's going to pull it off. Now, it might be a stretch to say that this scene played out in real life in Oklahoma in the 2000s.

Just the roles were reversed. The fight took place in the USA. But the boxers in the ring of the black market caviar world were from the former Soviet Union. And we'll learn that often the Oklahoma Gamewardens and federal agents pitted against these Russians in this boxing match on the river, felt like they were boxing-knive and Drago, an almost unbeatable foe. But to go back a little more into real history, not Hollywood history, the Soviet Union would collapse in 1991, and the ripples would roll into Oklahoma's fisheries.

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. The last thing on Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev's mind

was how tearing down the wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union would affect the biologically rich American rivers of the Midwest, teeming with the ancient Polydon Spathula, the majestic spoonbill, or the paddlefish. It seems like it might have been the first thing they considered, but it wasn't. I'm joking, but it's interesting when global politics intersect wildlife management, and it did just that. We learned that a trade embargo with Iran and the collapse of the Soviet Union essentially shut down the sturgeon caviar coming into the United States. Sturgeon caviar is the best in the world. Caviar had been an important cultural staple in much of Europe for over a thousand years. Their rich sturgeon-filled rivers

had made caviar as common on the tables as butter in many areas. That's true. And because of that, it made its way deeply into the culinary and even religious cultural. of Europe. But the rivers were overfished. Sturgeon populations collapsed. Trade embargoes came on the world. The Soviet Union collapsed. And the world was now looking for a new source of black caviar. That is the pivot point of this whole story. And it didn't take them long to learn about our unexploded Midwestern rivers rich with caviar. But these Europeans weren't the first ones to illegally trade paddlefish eggs in Oklahoma. On the last episode, we heard about a bunch of good old boys from Oklahoma doing it. This stuff can be worth up to $35 an ounce, which adds up to over $500 a

pound. This stuff is expensive. We also learned that paddlefish caviar is in the top three to four caviars in the world. The demand was there. This black market American story starts in the late 1980s when paddlefish caviar first began to be exploited and illegally sold to fill in the gaps left by this global caviar vacuum. You'll remember Gameward and Keith Green on the first episode talking about catching Billy Wissard on Fort Gibson Lake and the incredible story of redemption of Billy later working with the department as their lead legal egg producer. That was just part one of our story. Jeff Brown

is a retired Oklahoma game warden. He's an incredible guy and a legendary lawman in the sooner state. He spent his career protecting Oklahoma wildlife. But in eastern Oklahoma, paddlefish were the dominant player in his career.

Here's Jeff introducing us to Operation Russian Snag. We really got ramped up and started Operation Russian snag. That was the, you know, the federal government, federal agencies, they'd like to put names on everything. So we come up with, with Operation Russian Snag. And that started in about 2008. Okay. It'd been going on. We'd been working on for a couple of years. So let's say 2005 through

2015. So from, for about a decade, it was hot and heavy. It was 18, it was 18, 20 hours a day. as far as I know with the exception of one fishery up on the Missouri River and there's no other place you can sport fish for paddof fish like you can here in Oklahoma. So it all had to do with the regulation and this is kind of the paddlefish hub of the U.S. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. At the time we had a, we went through a progression of limit. So there was a period of time there where you could catch a fish a day.

So if you fished every day, you could catch 365 fish. Well, they would show up with 10 or 15 people. and that's how many fish they took. That was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, a collaboration between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the ODWC, Oklahoma Department of Wildlife, our enforcement division. It was just a concerted effort to address this group of fishermen and try to figure out just exactly what was going on. We knew that there was a commercial nexus there. We weren't 100% sure what it consisted of.

It's tricky business in modern times telling the true stories of how things actually happen, especially when it involves other nationalities. Oddly, in 2024, telling the story that places Russia in a fairly negative light is socially acceptable because of the general disapproval in the west of Vladimir Putin and Russia's war against Ukraine. I've even heard that Brent Reeves is squirrel-hunted with Putin. That's not true, but you should see my Instagram meme. It's hilarious. But seriously, it's not lost on me that if this story was about another nationality, perhaps it would be viewed as inappropriate to directly talk about the offenders

and make assumptions about their culture. I'd just like to say from the start that I'm certain. I don't fully understand the dynamics of the situation, these people's culture, and their motivations. And my starting place is an assumption that the majority, majority of Russians residing in the United States today a hardworking, honest people. But in this story, a select group of them were breaking the law. And that's an interesting story.

So we're going to talk about it. Here's Jeff. I started September 1, 1985. Went to work as a game warden for the Wildlife Department. They shipped me to Western Oklahoma. I stayed out there five years. I'm from this part of the state from down around Tulsa. So the first opportunity I got, I moved back close to home.

I've been here in this area since September of 90 and immediately was immersed into the paddlefish wars, as we officially called them. We spent, and I say we, I mean game wardens in this district overall in the springtime, that's all we did was paddlefish work. That's all we did. You know, we'd make literally thousands of cases a year just on paddlefish.

You know, people not tagging their fish. You have to tag your fish. You have to fill out a record of game. You have to check in your fish. People catching over limits. The whole gamut. But most of our work was done on paddle fish enforcement in this district. At full staff, District 1, which includes Northeast Oklahoma here, 10 counties in the northeast,

which 90% of the paddlefish resource is and where the sport fishing takes place, At full staff, including the district captain, there was 17 of us. And, man, it was all hands on deck for three months. That's all we did. There was one year there where we, I want to say, there was like 20-some thousand paddlefish permits were issued. And the very next year, that doubled in size in the number of paddlefish permit. In the 1990s probably. 2008 is when we really saw the paddlefish caviar deal really coming into play.

So in the 1990s, most of your violations with paddlefish were just recreational fishermen, just like catching too many fish. Then you started to see actual poachers taking their paddlefish into Arkansas and sell them. In the 90s, we saw that going on too, but it was local people doing it. Local people. So we started really paying attention to people poaching paddlefish for their caviar and caught. several groups, resident people who were doing just that. We had some laws introduced and passed that were made it illegal to possess over so many pounds of caviar.

And when that happened, we didn't have to wait for them to leave the state. As soon as they loaded a vehicle up and looked like they were running, as soon as they got on the interstate like they were headed out, we would stop them. Anywhere from an 18-wheeler, we've stopped 18-wheelers and gone through them, and they'd have their caviar hidden underneath the vegetables. in a reefer truck or whatever. We just unload them on the side of the highway and take their caviar

and ride them a bunch of tickets and let them go. There's a whole progression there. When we kind of waited through the locals, we call them Bubb is affectionately, just for lack of anything else. You know, the local guys. We kind of got all that weighted through, caught all of those that we knew the players

and sent some of them to prison. Some of them were some bad actors. sent some to prison. So some of these guys were violating at that level. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Or put so many restrictions on them that they couldn't fish anymore, maybe suspend their fishing license, you know, made it so that if they showed back up on the riverbank,

they could get in trouble. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in 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 car. 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 Phelps gamecalls.coms.com. I think you'll be glad you did and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. In the 1990s, most of the paddlefish violators, including egg poachers, were locals and the department felt like they had the situation under control. But in the early 2000s, they took notice of an interesting change in demographics. In one year, it went from like 20-some thousand paddlefish permits issued to like 50,000. It doubled in one year. Wow.

We went through all the paddlefish permit holders. It's one thing good about it. We'd go through there and compared our numbers to the number of Eastern Europeans that had a paddlefish permit. And it was like at one time, it was as high as like 500. Eastern Europeans had paddlefish permits from all from various states. All over the United States are coming here. So, you know, that's something we realized we was up against.

How did you first, did you come aware? I mean, is it just like a game warden walking down the bank, checking fishing license, talking to people, and for decades since the dawn of time, it was people from Oklahoma that you're meeting. And all of a sudden you shake hands with a guy from Russia. Yeah, and they've got Russian sounding names. I mean, for lack of a better way of putting it. Did that like phase in or was it just like all of a sudden it's just like,

Hey, Bill, your other officer, did you realize that half the people we talked today were Russians? It was almost overnight. So they just showed up. They just showed up. Were y'all immediately suspicious of that? Yeah. And it's a cultural thing to them. You know, it's a big deal.

And they would, and we talked to several of them. And they'd tell us all the healing properties and how all the great things that, that, how good they were for your body, you know, to eat these, eat these fish eggs and they loved it. It's clear that it meant more to them in their culture than it did in ours. Oh, absolutely. So they were willing to sacrifice anything. They found like a bird nest on the ground when they came to Oklahoma. Up until then, all the local people we dealt with was taking the paddlefish and running

it through commercial fishermen in other states. They weren't using it themselves. The Eastern Europeans, not only were they catching it for themselves, but they were catching it for all their extended family. Wow. There were big Russian communities and cities. And the way it was put to us by other federal agencies that we contacted to help us with this is that they were, as a community, they were real tight. All the Eastern European community in Tulsa had real tight connections to all the other Eastern European. communities and vice versa. And when the Soviet Union disintegrated as a block, a lot of these

people were displaced. They immigrated to the United States to get away from persecution or whatever. Whatever they were doing and the old Soviet Union wasn't going to work for them anymore and they immigrated to the United States. And with that, they brought their culture. And part of that culture was with caviar and they found a they really ready source for it and man they started exploiting it just overnight i wonder how much awareness they would have had because you know people coming out of the soviet union going to different big cities in the u.s and these people end up in Tulsa and they and they start working and doing what they do and maybe have businesses or whatever and then i wonder how aware they were if they're like man spoonbill populations are

good in the Midwest, especially over there in Oklahoma. Let's move there. I mean, or if it was like they just ended up in Tulsa by a random chance, let's say, and then they're like, holy cow, these hillbillies aren't using the eggs, you know? No, and that was a big part of it. It's kind of like all of a sudden somebody threw a light switch on and they realized what they had or what they were close to. Yeah.

Well, then the Eastern European community in Tulsa would bring in members from other Eastern European communities in other states. And we started seeing lots of Colorado people, lots of people from Minnesota. We made some good cases on those. From the northwest, these people had relocated in various big cities, and when they realized that Oklahoma had caviar, and the game was on.

They were on it. They were on it. A lot of it was for their own personal consumption. But then they started peddling it amongst themselves a lot. We noticed that when they would come here and they would line the bank and be fishing and say a local person down the creek there, down the bank there caught a paddle fish, man, they'd go over there and try to buy it from them. We knew that we had a problem and we was trying to get ahead of it and it took a long time. and what we found out is that we were fighting a losing battle

and the only way we were going to get this stop probably was to legislate it to the point that it would make it too hard for them to do it. Like Rocky Balboa by the start of the second round with Drago, he knew he was in trouble, and so did the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife. Here's some more details on how the paddlefish war proceeded. Starting out, we identified three different groups,

or family groups that we felt like we're really involved in it. And they were in the Tulsa area. And even to the extent that people would not come, people that came from out of state would go through them. They would either stay with them while they were here or took direction from them. And we would just sit and watch them fish. And one particular group, there were several family members.

They would show up on the next to them. the riverbank and it was all business they had some of the somebody was in charge of fishing somebody was in charge of checking the fish when they got it to the bank to see whether it had eggs in it or not another one was in charge of ripping the eggs out of the fish another one was in charge of getting the eggs to the truck I mean it was an assembly line once those eggs made it to a vehicle man boom they're gone and and they had counter surveillance they would have vehicle that would run interference. They knew that we were watching them,

and they would have vehicles that would cut us off when we were trying to follow them. They went out of their way not to get caught. When all this started, we went to the FBI to see if we could get some help. And they weren't any arrested in helping us because there wasn't enough money involved. It wasn't a big enough fish for them to fry, so to speak.

But they did tell us, say, look, we're not surprised at all because, and it had to do with the system they were brought up in, you know, the old Soviet block. That's how they, if they wanted to be affluent and have money in the old Soviet block, they had to learn how to scheme the system. And they brought that with them to the United States. Wow. And, you know, and we go back to talk about how organized they were.

There was one particular guy that we kind of recognized as the kingpin out of the whole thing. And there may be some Eastern Europeans. that would come down here from Minnesota or whatever, and oh, so-and-so would be on the bank down there. Every Eastern European who was here fishing would go, for lack of a better word, and pay homage to him. They would go up to him and someone would bow to him. Really?

Yeah, and come to find out that a lot of these people were real big in the Russian Orthodox Church, and I think this guy was a church leader. Wow. And so y'all noted, like from your surveillance, Malins like, that guy, everybody that comes here is going to that guy. He watched how they treated him. He was the Daddy Rabbit.

Somehow, some way. You know, he either... Now, was he not a focal point of the investigations? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Did you ever catch him? No. Never caught him. Some of his people.

Daddy Rabbit still on the loose. Now, no, he probably got some citations for doing... He probably got some citations for violations. But as far as, he facilitated everything, as far as we could tell. The eggs that went to Seattle were his group. Yeah, his group. There was a big paddlefish caviar bust in Seattle

that had a lot of Oklahoma eggs in it. Okay, let's play a little game here. So Eastern Europeans come to rural Oklahoma. Game wardens are watching them. They stand out because they're from a different culture. Oh, you could see them. We would look. Our vantage point was across the river.

river right there was real wide, so they're a half mile away. We'd have to watch them with binoculars. Okay. You could pick everyone them out simply by the way they were dressed. Oh, really? Yeah. Really? Yeah.

How would they dress? A lot of them wore workout clothes, the jogging apparel, track suits. Or they'd be mismatched badly. And no, no. Badly mismatched. Really? Yeah. You could just pick them out.

Very rarely, very rarely could we not. Wow. But you could look across there and say, Yep, Russia. And you just knew it. You just knew it. Okay, so this plays right into my game. So let's say the roles were reversed

and that people from rural Oklahoma went to Russia and were doing something, some illegal fishing in Russia. Okay, so when you're watching these guys through binos, they're going to this kingpin and like kissing his ring and bowing to him and, you know, they're doing whatever in their culture makes sense for them to do to the big dog. what would what would how would the russians pick out the rural oklahomans over there

overall there again probably by the way they were dressed yeah yeah camo and yeah real real tree camo it's it's funny and this that made me think of something so when all this was first really getting ramped up and went to the feds and we got to have some help well they brought in feds from all over the country and there was about 10 or so of them showed up one day the federal agents, and they're going to go down and go fishing with them. Can't see what's going on? They picked everyone on them out. The Russians picked out the agents.

Every one of them. Really? To the point that they finally said, we're doing no good here. We're leaving. Wow. Yeah. They even went up to them and said, we know you're the police. Picked them out.

Picked them out. Wow. That's why we corned the phrase, sticks out like a fed at a snagging hole. Sticks out like a fad at a snagging hole. I like that. That's funny. That's what we'd call getting the tea, as the young kids say these days. And I don't want to generalize too much, but it seemed clear from all the information they were getting,

even from the federal government, that this group of people knew how to get around systems. The Eastern Europeans, they knew we were watching them, and they were watching us. One incident in particular, we were going to try to set a pole camera up, on one of the places in Tulsa. And a lady come outside, and she knew exactly what was going on. She knew what we were doing.

It was a utility company out there putting this pole camera, which looked like, I mean, you can't tell it's a camera to look at it. It was a camera made to look like a, actually made to look like an electric transformer or something. Anyway, she picked up on it immediately. What'd she say? She'd come outside and looked up here and said, what are y'all doing? And, you know, that business dried up.

I think we used it. Just maybe some background. We were told by the FBI that some of these people, if they've got a hand in it, they have made their living getting around the rules. And they come by it honestly because that's what they had to do in the old Soviet Union. We had spreadsheets of phone numbers. And there would be a phone that's registered to this Eastern European, but this guy uses it and seemingly they're not connected but yet he's using a phone that this guy

pays for and there's a lot of that and uh i had a whole bunch of names at one time that we was using an analyst in washington dc she worked for one of the federal agencies and i called her on the phone i don't remember her name now and i said can you check these people's out for me yeah so she called me back she goes what are you all doing and I told her and she goes this is the bad of the bad so I don't know what y'all are getting into so but these people are on lots of different agencies you know radar she knew or she didn't know them but she knew the names and these were people down here cat bar fishing yeah that's interesting here's jeff describing the overall strategy of operation Russian snag.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had been brought in as a partner on this, and they took the lead, and what they wanted to do was let these eggs go, and hoping that they could find where they were going on the other end to kind of cut the head off the snake, so to speak, which was a good idea in theory. But it was so hard to be able to get that done. We, when I say we, I mean that I was in charge of Loose Lee, along with Matt Bryant, the federal agent here in the state at the time. Together, we kind of ran this task force and followed eggs all the way to the Seattle area, Portland, followed eggs to Denver area, trying to figure out where they were ending up, where they were going.

Had some success, followed one group of eggs all the way to New York City, got up there, lost them, but we knew that's where they ended up. Well, just a few days later, that same group of eggs, we knew right down to the pound how many eggs they should have. We knew how many fish they caught, how many pounds of eggs those fish should have produced. The Canadian government confiscated those eggs going over into Canada. We weren't able to make the case on it. The Canadian government wasn't interested in it.

They took the guy's eggs, but they didn't file charges on him. and the U.S. attorney was reluctant to file charges on them under whatever circumstances. Was there any pinnacle charges brought on any one particular person that would be like the hallmark of Russian snag? Just like we got these guys. Yeah, they were like I said, when we finally started decided that we were not going to start to keep letting these eggs go out of the state, we started stopping them. we got some substantial fines off of some of them. We stopped a vehicle over on I-35, headed up into Kansas and eventually over the Denver area.

They had 300 and some pounds of processed eggs of caviar. Wow. They ended up paying over $100,000 with caviar. And they ended up paying almost $20,000 in fines and restitution. What happens to the caviar you confiscate? That 300 pounds is what happened to it? As far as I know, it was kept as evidence for a long time and then it was disposed of.

Really? Yeah, we couldn't. Not even a single dip of the cracker into it, huh? No, and I wouldn't. What would become instrumental and actually being able to catch and convict paddlefish egg violators would come down to a simple change in the law,

which was spearheaded by Jeff. It seems like stuff like this would be easier to do, but sometimes the systems just aren't that nimble. However, the problem was almost completely solved with one simple change. At that time, if you wanted to catch a paddlefish, you had to go to the Grand River system to do it. At the same time, all this was going on, the Wildlife Department and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was reintroducing paddlefish into a lot of different lakes. Ula Galle Lake, which is right here close, was one of them.

But all the lakes in northeast Oklahoma now have viable population of paddle fish. fish in them. So now that pressure is being spread out over the whole northeastern part of the state as opposed to just one river system. Well, what that did is maybe take some of the pressure off that Grand River system, but it made Game Warden's life that much harder. Because now, instead of us being able to concentrate on a particular river system, now we had it going on all over. At Kahl Lake, at Ula Gull Lake, at Keystone Lake, you follow Lake, just everywhere. Navigation Channel. I went to the Wildlife Department in about 2013 or 14 and said,

we got to have some help. So we can't do this anymore. And I met a lot of resistance. My proposal was we shut snagging down at nighttime. After dark, we don't want any snagging. Well, we can't do that because, you know, we're taking away opportunity from Joe Fisherman. I said there's no family out there at midnight paddle fishing.

It's not happening. If they're doing it, you know, the old adage, if it's happening after midnight, there's no good in it. There's a lot of truth to that. Man, they just really, really fought against it. And finally we come up with a compromise. We're in northeast Oklahoma. We made it illegal to fish snag for paddlefish from 10 o'clock at night to, I think it was 6 o'clock in the morning, with the exception of one place. That one thing did more than anything to shut this down, or at least at least,

keep it to where we could keep a lid on it. Because if they couldn't do it under the cover of darkness, they weren't going to do it. That validated our already suspicion or what we knew to be. They weren't sport fishing. Yeah. They were doing it for the eggs and the eggs only. That's how important it was to us. It's a unique fish.

It can and is exploited. And that's one way that I really push this regulation change to. our fisheries people is look said historically the game wardens in this part of the state we've dedicated our life to protecting these fish if you want that level of protection to continue we've got to make some real changes because we cannot as a group keep up this pace that's all we did for 20 hours a day for 60 90 days out of every spring and I went 10 15 years and never got to into the turkey woods because it happens at the same time. In Oklahoma, we got big sandbass fisheries and those sandbass fishermen went several years without ever seeing a game warden

because we were concentrating on the paddlefish because they're so susceptible to exploitation. Anytime, and this is my belief wholeheartedly, anytime wildlife and money are involved, wildlife loses every time. I mean, you go back to the turn of the century and that's what got us in the position we were in. It was the commercial harvest of wildlife. And that still goes on today, not on that scale. But absolutely, if left unchecked, you know, the wildlife comes out on the short end of the stick every time. So finally, we got some rules changed. And the biggest thing is that they now could not do it under the cover of darkness. What that did for is, for a game warden, is before we'd have to sit on them all night long

and wait for them to make a violation. Well, if they couldn't be there to begin with, that made our job easier because, and it happened some. We still worked all night, but if we saw somebody snagging, we didn't have to wait for them to violate. They were already in violation. We'd just go get them.

Yeah. And it didn't take very much of that. I'm going to say two years in, we've got good, we had good compliance. A lot of those Eastern Europeans there again, they knew we were watching them. We knew they were watching us. and we'd go down and sit down on the bank and just talk to them.

And they're jolly people, a lot of them. Yeah. It's just, man, they wanted them paddlefish heads. They wanted that caviar at all cost. And it's kind of like, yeah, we're doing it. Catch us if you can. And, you know, we finally got to where we could, and it hurt them some. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over.

They just get darker. seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed and there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness.

Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to ask Jeff a question. I'm compelled to ask almost every law enforcement officer I encounter. Did you ever feel in danger or anything and doing your undercover work with any of this? Not with the Russians, so to speak.

They always felt like they had the upper hand and they did, actually. But with the Bubba, some of that bunch were dangerous. and there was one particular guy that I had a big party in arresting. We put him in prison. He had been arrested a few times before for the same thing over the years. We followed him to Silum Springs. As soon as he crossed the line at Silum Springs, we arrested him. He was a convicted felon.

We knew, everybody knew. That was one person that if he ever caught you right by yourself, it was a gunfight. But we... What did you get him for? paddlefish oh he he was dealing in eggs yeah he he I was I was sitting I was sitting on his house one night I sit on his house he he lived in an area and and I got dumped out along with other people several several nights over two or three years until finally one morning I was sitting on his house and here comes a pickup and they start loading ice chest in the back of it and I radioed keith

I said we're on and we got everybody we got everybody rounded up and followed him the asylum springs. And as soon as he crossed the line in the asylum springs, we stopped him. He was a convicted felon. And what we ended up sending him to prison for is that he had one shotgun shell in his vehicle, which violated his probation. Oh, wow. And even though.

So all that wildlife violated. And he couldn't get him on anything. He went to prison because of that one shotgun shell. Really? Well, we didn't care. We didn't care how we caught him as long as we caught him. What's wrong with the system when you can't really prosecute real criminals? I mean, like, as a Game Boarding who's committed your life.

And, you know, and I can make sense of it only this way. Wildlife isn't that big of a deal to most prosecutors and judges. And I understand it. You know, you've got people that are murdering, raping, you know, rob and stealing. Yeah, if you're looking at the hierarchy of problems in society. If you're looking at the hierarchy, paddlefish smuggling is. way down here. I get that. I get that. Over the years, we've had some good prosecution locally. When we would catch some of these guys with eggs and we would stop them,

we quit letting them go out of state and we would stop them and take their eggs and stuff. We got some good prosecution on them. But on a big scale, if that, this is my opinion, if that attorney needed to, was going to have to invest a lot of time in figuring it out, it wasn't worth him to him really yeah now if we brought if we brought him a case that was locked solid we caught him here's the eggs we wrote him

these tickets max him out he's all about it but if it was something like a conspiracy deal or some big long investigation that he was going to have to weed through a stack of papers that thick it wasn't going to happen wow wow and it's still that way today

it wasn't only paddlefish it's just that way Do you feel like that's an injustice or do you feel like that's just part of the game? That's just part of the game. So you don't get your feelings hurt by that? No, you can't. Yeah. You can't. But people that like us, like you, like me, like the people that value wildlife so much

and have dedicated a big section of their life, like when I hear about a paddlefish criminal, I mean, it's like high level offense, you know. It is in a game warden's world. It's interesting to hear you say that. I've never had anybody sell me. that as good as you just did, yeah, most people's radar, this is not that big of a violation to society. Yeah.

And that's hard for me to hear because, you know, we love all this stuff so much. It's a big part of our lifestyle. There are some prosecutors and some judges that are wildlife or outdoor people. They're hunter and fishermen, and they get it. And consequently, we would get better cooperation from them. Honestly, there's not that many of them that are like that. And especially on the federal side, they've got so many, you know, on the federal side, they're dealing with the bad of the bad.

And a paddlefish, it's like the guy that we caught in Salome Springs with the eggs, and he had that one shotgun shell. That, you know, this attorney was all over that, because that's a big deal. He violated his federal probation. So we're sending him back to the pen. The eggs, that's immaterial, you know. And we didn't care why. why he went back to the pen. We just know he went back to the pen.

Got him out of our hair for a little bit. Yeah. And he came out of the pen. He come out of the pen too old to paddlefish anymore, and that was a blessing to us. But he was a dangerous individual. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around serious wildlife criminals, not being treated by the judicial system as legit criminals. But really, I don't know if that's good or bad.

Should someone be able to have, let's say, a lot of. sentence for a wildlife violation. And with all the problems in the world, it's thinly stretched as all our law enforcement and judicial systems are. I guess it makes sense. I just don't really like it because wildlife is so important to me and my culture, our culture, probably if you're listening to this. I'd like to wrap up this series by one last conversation about caviar. I'm really intrigued by it. And at the time of this recording, I've never eaten caviar. Its scarcity, its financial cost, its perception is a status symbol of wealth and luxury, is endlessly fascinating to me.

Kind of like mules in my culture. Mules are kind of like the caviar of the hill folk. But I have one more question. Let me ask you about consumption of caviar kind of in the United States. that would be when I think about wildlife resources and eating wild game and eating fish we catch, there is not caviar in my cultural rolodex of stuff that we would eat. Like it wouldn't even, if I caught a big fish that had a bunch of fish eggs in it, that would be the last thing that I would want to eat.

Are there people in Oklahoma that, is that somewhere in the cultural knowledge of people to eat caviar? So basically, the Eastern European and kind of the wealthy elite that ate caviar have influenced people where they get it. And so you think there's a lot of caviar fans in Oklahoma? No. No. You know, it's the more influential crowd, kind of a status deal, I guess. But that would be clear. But people who are like that have the money to go buy it anyway.

You can buy paddlefish caviar on the legal open market all day long. Most of it comes from legal sources. Some of it is illegal sources that's been laundered through legal sources. Where could you go buy paddlefish caviar? In New York City, could you buy paddlefish caviar? Yes. There are caviar shops. One of them is, I've been to New York City one time of my life,

and it just so happened accidentally walking down a street and I look, and there is a caviar shop. And I recognize the name on it because it was one of the names that had come up in our investigation and stuff. Wow. Even a lot of this unlawful caviar ended up in legal caviar shops. And the Fish and Wildlife Service has been working on a way to do DNA testing on caviar to tell where it comes from. To tell what watershed that it comes from. You'll remember retired Oklahoma game board and Keith Green from the last episode.

He's a caviar expert. I had one last question for him. How do you eat it? What do you eat it on a cracker? Yeah, if you really taste it. You have to put your pinky up in the air when you hold the cracker? No, if you really taste and testing it, you want to know what it's really tasting like. It would take this a little bit out and put it just a little bit right here.

Put it on your thumb? Yeah, maybe 15. eggs. Do you think that caviar has become a cultural phenomena here with the local people? No. Why? We're just too redneck.

You know, I've... But if it's so good, does it not... Would I... I've never had it. Would I not... Like, why... It seems like if people make such a fuss about it, it would be good anywhere. You know what I mean?

Yeah, but here you've got people cleaning fish every day. And they're throwing away all the eggs, and they've seen those eggs thrown away, and how can you eat fish eggs? How can you? Are you kidding me? I'm really interested in this caviar. We're going to try to get some Oklahoma caviar. Where can we get it? Well, it's ending right now. Can we buy it somewhere? No, it doesn't exist anymore. There is no Oklahoma caviar anymore. Really? So we can't buy it anywhere. No, you could have last year at this time. How do I get it then? You don't. You got to catch a fish and make it yourself. Really? Yeah. What Keith means by it ended last year is that they've

shut down the paddlefish research center so the state no longer deals commercially in paddlefish eggs. Their creation of the program was never about money and after almost 15 years of research they had all the data they needed. So the program that Keith pioneered has come to an end. It only seems appropriate to me to end this series with one of the greatest American speeches of reconciliation ever made. I came here tonight. I didn't know what to expect. I've seen a lot of people hating me and I didn't know what to feel about that so I guess I didn't like you much none either. I don't know that.

During this fight I've seen a lot of changing. The way you felt about me and the way I felt about you. And I've also changed. In here, there were two guys killing each other. But I guess that's better than 20 million. So I think that's better than 20 million dollars.

So what I'm trying to say is that if I can change, and you can change. You can change. Everybody should change. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please leave us a review on iTunes and share a podcast with your friends and family. And tell them about the wild stories you're hearing on Bear Grease and Brent's this country life. Truly, we appreciate you guys listening to us.

And we love y'all. Don't forget about being able to watch the Bear Grease Render podcast on Meteor's New Year. YouTube channel. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed and there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit.

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there. but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwards. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness.

Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

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