June 12, 2024 • 49 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Let me do the math here, forty eight hundred dollars
average sized female that you caught it be worth five
grand yep on bear grease. We've made a living telling
the gritty stories of rural America, of backwoodsmen and long hunters,
cowboys and Native American leaders, law men and outlaws. I
hate to admit it, boys, but I've completely turned the
(00:29):
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
(00:49):
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 gonna
(01:11):
want to miss this one, if you can even believe
it at all.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
All these wardens converged on them. We had chuck guns and.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
It did you lead the chart you called the what'd
you say to them?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
State?
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Game warden state, that's not what you want to hear
in the in the dark anytime, is it not?
Speaker 2 (01:27):
With a batch of eggs.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
My name is Klay Nukem, and this is the Bear
Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Presented by f HF gear, American made, purpose built hunting
(02:00):
and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as
the places we explore. Phil We're gonna have to start
from the top. I think we just have to tell
them about Caviar. There's just not another starting point. Here
we go.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
I'm Alan Morris at Sterling Caviar. We're just outside of Sacramento, California.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
I'm assuming this is catching the average bear Grease listener
a little left guard Caviar, But I'll tell you this
is a foundational piece of understanding for this story.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
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 in the imperial
(03:04):
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 say, oh, yeah,
we had when I was a little kid, we had
caviar for breakfast every day in Russia, and so that's
kind of where it started.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
The Persians first called salted fish eggs kaviar, 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
(03:46):
sixteen hundreds, when the Russian Orthodox Church decided that even
though they required fasting from meat for as many as
two hundred 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
(04:08):
eighteen hundreds, the supply of sturgeons seemed endless. Beluga an
etcetera sturgeon fish native to wider Europe, is the best
caviar in the world period. Beluga sturgeons sometimes only reproduce
every twenty five years, and after centuries of commercial pressure,
sturgeon are endangered in Europe, and today it's illegal to
(04:31):
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 to 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,
(04:53):
caviar is alive and well.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
It's another jazzling Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
I'm Robin Leach with those champagne wishes and caviadres.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Robin Leech hosted the television show Lifestyles of the Rich
and Famous from nineteen eighty four to nineteen eighty five,
and coin the phrase champagne wishes and caveat dreams. But
what's all the fuss about? Does this stuff really even
taste good?
Speaker 3 (05:28):
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 palette.
And what you want to do is you're feeling those
individual beads and then as they pop, you'll get a rich,
(05:52):
buttery flavor and then a cascade of flavors. There's going
to be some bright accidity to it. I want some minerality.
I want a breath of the sea or a hint
of the sea, and also some earthiness. We call it merwar,
just like tear war and 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
(06:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
I'm sitting in the police station in Vanita, 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
sky live in Venida, a town of fifty one hundred
(06:47):
people in northeast Oklahoma. Venita 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 damned, creating incredibly fecunned lakes like Grand Keystone
(07:13):
and you fallow. Does this sound like caviar country? I
don't know. I'm meeting with retired Oklahoma game board and
Keith Green. He's in his early seventies, wiry, full of energy,
and grin's ear to ear. At the conclusion of each sentence,
will learn that Keith is a bona fide hero of
Oklahoma conservation, a pioneer. I assume this is rare for
(07:37):
a caviar expert, but in his prime he was as
good an Elk bowhunter as existed. He owns a string
of pack mules and nine bird dogs. Today he does
Keith is also an accomplished fisherman.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
My dad when we were in the late sixties, he
was loading us up with his boat and go into
Mexico to all the old Mexico lakes bass fishaw And
in seventy three I won the Oklahoma State Basque Championship
and beat Jimmy Houston. He was second. I was I
(08:13):
was eighteen seventeen or eighteen, so we bass fish.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
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
(08:38):
was part one.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
In eighty seven. It was an Iranian embargo with the
United States, and ninety percent of our caviar came from Iran,
our black caviar, so our caviar quit, we lost it,
So there was a they started looking for a substitute.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
And caviar coming into the United States yes, was gone,
was gone. So the people that were wanting caviar was
looking for another.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Source absolutely, and come to find out, paddlefish had dark
black eggs, their kin 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
(09:30):
freeze it. Battlefish caviar you can freeze, and you can
also pasteurize.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
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 polydn spathula,
also known as the spoon bill, and it has black
(09:59):
row and is one of the top caviars 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's supply had begun to create the backdrop for
some serious illegal activity for our final foundational piece to
(10:22):
begin to tell the 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.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
Paddlefish are a very unique fish and that they're prehistoric,
the cardilaginous. They don't have any hard bones in them.
The only scaleful structure is their rostrum, which is a
long snout. Other than that, they have a cartilage encased
final cord that runs the length through their body. And
other than that, there's no bone. Town They have a
(11:05):
thick hide. They have a really big area or a
streak that runs from 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 this spring, I think.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
On March seventeenth, twenty twenty four, first time paddle fisherman
Chad Williams broke the world record by snagging a one
hundred and sixty four pounds thirteen ounce paddlefish in Missouri's
Lake of the Ozarks. The former world record was one
hundred and sixty four pounds even and came out of
Keystone Lake near Tulsa, Oklahoma. The age of natural systems
(11:49):
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, ninety nine percent of
this species that have ever existed are now extinct. So
when a species outlast is peers and critics, it's worth
taking a note and tipping your hat. Here is Oklahoma
(12:12):
Department of Wildlife Fisheries biologist Brandon Brown.
Speaker 5 (12:17):
You know, paddlefish are such a bizarre looking fish. They're primitive.
They are an ancient species. They were around, or at
least the relatives were around well before the dinosaurs. Probably
the most bizarre thing about them is their rostrum, their bill,
and a lot of people used to think that they
use that to stir up the mud and then kind
(12:39):
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 put them
in a round tank, but they glued basically plankton to
the end of wires, and those little paddle fish could
(13:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
That's pretty wild. But here's where paddlefish start to stand
out as caviar producing machines.
Speaker 5 (13:30):
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 crappie, you know, 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 fifteen or
(13:51):
twenty pounds of eggs out of her. So she's producing
about a third of her body weight sometimes into reproduction.
That is a huge metal bolic investment to think every year,
every other year, whatever happens to be, that she's literally
producing a third of her body weight into eggs.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Culsta VARs of corn with big ears make for big yields,
and giant fish with huge volumes of black eggs create
incredible caviar.
Speaker 4 (14:20):
They're long lived. They'll live maybe to fifty years old
or so. They don't reproduce till they're anywhere between six
and twelve 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's called what we call
and referred to as as your classes. We'll have a
(14:42):
pretty good good idea when the fish spond, 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 kitching are from one
year class, and so they can wipe that year class out.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Here's Brandon on paddlefish spawning.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
So we consider paddlefish episodic spawners, meaning they spawn in
these big boom or bust episodes. It's not unusual to
see at eight or even a ten or fifteen year
gap in between those spawning events. Significant spawning events episodic spawners.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
That's an insightful biological descriptor.
Speaker 5 (15:27):
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 a paddlefish country, so to speak. They once
range from Louisiana all the way up into Canada in
(15:47):
some places. But over the last fifty 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 fifty
years ago. They're expanding both in the range within the
(16:10):
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
(16:32):
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 US more fertile, you know, than.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
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. You
know that they don't spawn until March April, but the
(17:20):
row is you can make caviar out of it earlier
than what they spawn. The beluga sturgeon population in the Russia,
the Old Soviet Union collapsed from overfishing, and that caviar
market went away for the most part. And that is
(17:41):
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 twenty five to
thirty five dollars an ount, So that makes one fish
(18:02):
worth potentially quite a bit of money. It wasn't uncommon
for a fish to produce ten pounds of caviar.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Let me do the math here, forty eight hundred dollars
and yeah, an average, average sized female that you caught
that had ten pounds of caviar would be worth five
grand yep.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Wow. And that's just the caviar.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
And some people 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.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
That's a big money for a fish. 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 nineteen eighties. So here's what
(18:57):
we know. Caviar is in demand glow, but most Oklahoma's
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 caviard get discovered. Jed's oil got discovered when
(19:20):
someone shot a gun into the ground. Here's game Warden
Keith Green.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
There 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,
(19:46):
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 were
they had always been able to take paddlefish commercially on
(20:07):
Grand Lake with nets, and we started seeing them really
targeting paddlefish. They never targeted it before because it's not
it's not that it's not as good as flat 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
(20:27):
we kind of caught window 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 that I know,
those people at Claremore and and they were pretty well
going to the same market that we found out.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Over these these are just Oklahoma's.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yeah, these were, but they were connected for out of
state because of the muscle picking, and the muscle pickers
were the netters, and so it happened nationwide.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
This Frank Hale out of Tennessee was one of the
first major paddlefish caviar kingpins in the US, and he
started in the late nineteen eighties. In two thousand and four,
he'd be convicted of eleven charges in relation to the
Lacy Act. There was an article written about Frank Hale
and his caviar in the New York Times in nineteen
ninety and Oklahoma and Billy Wishard was a muscle picker
(21:27):
who commercially gathered muscles and learned about paddlefish caviar from Frank.
You gotta remember Billy, he'll be a major player in
this story. But also know that commercial fishing was outlawed
in Oklahoma in nineteen seventy four. This is also an
important part of the story, so there was no legal
(21:47):
way to sell paddlefish eggs in Oklahoma.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
In Oklahoma, we do not have commercial fishing like they
do up and down the Mississippi River Ohio River areas,
and those commercial fisherman will target paddlefish, 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.
(22:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
So there was no regulation on how many you could take.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
It's been kind of a progression when I first moved
to this area and we started really working them hard
that we had a fish 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, catching release. That in
and up self led to problems. If a person caught
(22:43):
a paddlefish 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 learned more, I say we, as
the waldleyfe Department learned more about the paddlefish, some rule
changes were made to restrict sport take. You know, all
(23:05):
we have is sport fishing, and it's progressed up to
today where it's a two fish limit per year and
that's all you can take is two fish per calendar year.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
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
(23:40):
market spoonbilt caviar. Now, my friends, we have a solid
foundation to understand the dynamics for the early years of
this illegal activity. I now want to get to know
game Board and Keith Green a little better. And here's
some story of busting egg poachers. And not to foreshadow
(24:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
The best thing that probably ever happened to me was
my game warning career. I loved every minute of it.
I was My dad was pretty much of a poacher,
he really, Yeah, he got to hunt one day a
week and that was on Saturdays, and he would be
quill hunting. We'd started in the morning, quit in the evening.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
He took advantage of that day of that day and.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
We're hunted the same places for thirty years, you know,
and never heard. He knew what he would 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 me in when I become a
game warden and I got a degree in wallife. He
called you from an Oklahoma university and you think, well,
(25:02):
it helped you catch them, And it did that, but
it also helped my mental state towards somebody doing a
violation just because they were doing a violation, they were
in a no good sorry center of it, and so,
and that's that's what happens to a lot of game wardens.
You're lied to by everybody, and you see these guys
(25:23):
doing things wrong, and 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 even the guys that
I caught. And you'll find out in this story here
(25:45):
the guy that I ended up hiring with the guy
that I had 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 ours,
night after night after night after night after night. Finally
got him and his brother had done some other stuff
(26:08):
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, any time
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 had completely converted him.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
The man whom Keith would later hire to help him
catch Oklahoma poachers was Billy Wisherd, the one who initially
started the black market trade in Oklahoma before nineteen seventy four,
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
(26:50):
world of illegal wildlife trade. But by the time Keith
caught him, the agency was way behind.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
And we were so far behind eight ball. The poachers
got on it. You know, they say, let's say it
started in eighty seven, maybe it was ninety five before
we knew it was ever raping our legs.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
So in eighty seven is when the embargo happened and
caviar wasn't coming into the United States, and that for
like eighty years, it was like the wild West. It
wasn't a lot of regulation.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
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 how many eggs thatts of eggs
you could have. Yeah, you could take it out of
the eggs out of state.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
There's just anything goes. For eight years, the black market
caviard trade ran wild and pretty much unnoticed in Oklahoma.
Then in nineteen ninety five 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
(27:58):
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 Wishard.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Him and his brother. They had nets out and they
would go 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 ten horse fifteen horse motor,
and he would cross the lake and go to where
they had their nets out, and one guy would run it.
(28:37):
The other guy would drive the truck around almost forty
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, stick it in
(29:00):
the back of their pickup and uh it would it. Actually,
they kept left the tailgate up and the would set
it in there like that.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Uh, with their fish. They would have their fish in
the back of the truck.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Gigs. They were throwing the fishing with eggs.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Oh, they were just taking the eggs, chunking the fish.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Absolutely, and uh, there's a guy there that they were
on a real real road down the east east side
of Fort Gibson Lake. Well, there was one house down.
Then the guy got off at twelve to one o'clock
and he was coming home and he called another game
warding down in district too. He said, hey, there's been
a boat. I've seen it twice in the back of
(29:36):
a pickup come out of here. So he called me
and I said, well, I'll go down.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
And now why was he suspicious of that boat?
Speaker 2 (29:44):
One one at one am, two am in the morning.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
That wouldn't be unusual for just a cat fishermen or something.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Not a boat stuck in the back of a pickup,
not on a trailer. No, it was just 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. Wouldn't go with me? And
we hid the truck off on a on a road.
We're sitting there and we're on the back tailgate of
(30:10):
the truck just being quite listening, and you're a motor
And we sat there and he was idling that little
tin horse for about the last mile and his brother
come in on the on the 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'd
(30:33):
heard the motor. We had crawled out through these cucko
burr flat and the cucko birds were about this tall
the guy and we're pretty big. And this road comes
down and circles around just like this, right in front
of this kucko bird 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
(30:55):
gone and gotten the open and we laid down on
those cucko birds and I know his butts sticking up
above those cucobirds 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 the guy
is stopped out about. The water was real shallow flat,
and he'd stopped out about seventy five yards from the
(31:18):
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 forty
five yards from them, and they're they're getting stuff and
loading the boat up and putting the motor in underneath
the boat. And I didn't see I didn't see anything
(31:40):
that I thought that they could have had eggs in
and the Gordon, I was with you, because you want
to get him I go. No, I said, we're going
to let him go. And that's a hard thing to do.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
And you suspected they were getting eggs.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Though, no question about it. Yeah, yeah, there's no reason
for him to be out and no rods, no tackle,
there's no doubt they're net and they've got ice boxes
that they didn't have eggs. The boxes they lifted them,
they were light and we let them drive off. That's
that was really hard not to hopefully you might get
something on them, you know. Yeah, So the next night
(32:17):
Jeff I took Jeff Brown y'all just talk 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
(32:39):
I find this out later. You know, something spooked them
from the night before. Somehow or other. We spooked them
a little bit, but that 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 willow tree in the water.
It's about this deep, and I've called out in by
that whillow tree. And uh, you got to have your
(33:01):
walkie talkie turned off if it makes it sound, you
know that. So we're sitting there and I watch them
bring the nets out the out of the boat. They
set them on a big rag and then they just
tied the four corners together. And he reached in and
got an ice chest and he could just it's a
big old these are big old guys. He could barely
lift it over the side of the boat.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
You know. It's full eggs, no doubt.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
And so I'm just whispering. I turned them knocked down 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, they I didn't
feel like they would try to hurt us. There are
some guys I felt like that would that would come
from out of state, that would try to hurt us. Yeah,
(33:45):
so all these wardens converged on them with shot and
we had shotguns and you know it.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Did you lead the chart? You called the Yeah? Yeah,
what'd you say to them?
Speaker 2 (33:54):
State game warden?
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Stay? That's not what you want to hear in the
in the dark anytime, is it not?
Speaker 2 (34:00):
With a batch of eggs? And so I ended up
going back. They let us search where they live.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
They had an okay, so you confront them and they
just gave up absolutely again And what did they have.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
These are friend I mean people you're acquainted.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
With absolutely and know them well.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
So you walk up in the dark and shine your
light and you're like Bill.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
They knew my voice when I said, state game Ward.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Wow, how much value did the eggs they had right
that day? You think they had a couple thousand dollars
worth of.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Egg Oh yeah, yeah, at least that. But let's say
they had seven or eight fish and seventy or eighty
pounds of eggs.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
So the finished product of that caviar would have been
like thirty five bucks an ounce, But for them, like
the raw caviar would have been less. Been like a farmer,
like an absolutely and there was a cornfield. He's not
getting the little.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Eggs, so the buyer could kind of rake them over
the coal anyway. They wouldn't tell us who their buyer was.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Now, how did you did you interrogate them?
Speaker 4 (35:07):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Absolutely, yeah, I question them and and he wouldn't get
give up his buyer.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
So Keith has now caught Billy Wishard, 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.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Said, hey, said a legal caviar buyers buyers, So you're
working undercover, you know them.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
I'm putting word out to somebody that I think they'll
get back to them.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Okay, And what did you what did you want them
to hear?
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Yeah? And I I actually told Billy about something. And
I was at a national symposium Chattanooga and sat down
with one of these and I said, this buyer was there,
and I went over 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
(36:13):
were taking illegal legs. It was the exact thing that
I'd told Billy, no question. Now I know who his
buyer is.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
To be crystal clear, Keith is at a fancy dancy
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 Wishered, and later this
lady relayed the secretly coded information back to Keith, which
(36:43):
indicated to him that she was in contact with Billy.
That's some fancy lawwork, brother. Here's more with Billy's route
to justice and redemption.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
And so the fans are working them anyway, and I
didn't know this. So we get with them, and I
fly Billy down to Tennessee. We do a profer with
the US attorney. He goes, uh, And a proffer is
that you tell me everything and I won't arrest you
for any of it. You don't.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
This is the guy that you caught yes on Fort
Gibson Fort Gibson.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
And if you miss something, then we're going to come
back on you. So he spilt the beans.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
He told who his who was buying the caviar from him.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, And like I say, I got to be really
good friends with him, and and and he and he changed.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Were they making a lot of money like this? Billy goes, okay,
I can tell you.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
When we went down and did the proffer, Billy the
first question he asked, He goes, iris going to come
back on me? He goes, well, how much we talking about?
And this was for about half of the spring. He goes, oh,
maybe two hundred thousand.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Oh wow, So he had made two hundred thousand like
that year.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Half of the spring half?
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Ah wow, this is like big money.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
No, it's it's it's a lot of money.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Oh absolutely, And my mouth kind of dropped a little
bit because I didn't know it was that much.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
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 Wishard would
work for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife in their state
(38:40):
of the art Paddlefish Research Center. Yes, that's right, I said.
They built a paddlefish center in two thousand and eight.
And guess who was the lead man that pioneered that
whole program. It was our man, Keith Green. The next
part of the story is almost unbelievable and one of
(39:00):
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.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
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 it the same time, the Wildlife Department wanted to
initiate a study on these paddlefish because their uniqueness, because
(39:34):
of their value, needed to know more about it. So
Keith Green, who was a game warden, 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
(39:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
So what people caught them.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Them for them.
Speaker 4 (40:25):
Well, a byproduct to 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 it
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 wallet department, we'll sell the eggs to pay
(40:46):
for the facility and the research. And it was really controversial.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
To make again crystal clear what's happening here and its significance.
Here's the layout. Commercial fishing is a leg 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.
(41:16):
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
(41:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
We got it built and run the first year, and
we did it for five hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
We told them it would take a year and a half.
We told the Walife Commission that it would probably take
about a year and a half to break even on it. Well,
the first year it produced one point five million and
so from the sell of eggs, and it was a
(42:14):
pretty hard deal. He wanted, 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.
(42:35):
It's illegal for anybody to sell their eggs. They could
use them for fish bait, they could make caviar at
them if they wanted. This was a volunteer program. But
they would bring their fish in and donate the eggs
to the Waife Department. But while while they were doing that,
we were going to pull both jaws out of the fish.
We're going to get the link of the fish. We're
(42:56):
going to get the weight of the fish. With the jaws,
were to be able to age them, and we can
start looking at our population of fish in the lake
a lot better and explain that to him, and it
was still that, well, we're the Walleffe Department. We shouldn't
be selling commercial stuff eggs. Yeah, And finally I brought
(43:19):
the point up that every penny's going back into the
general fund of the Walleff Department. It wasn't going anywhere else.
Every deer that we have in Oklahoma, we sell it
for twenty dollars apiece. You go buy your license for
twenty dollars. You go buy your turkey tag for ten dollars.
And when these people are bringing these fishing or we're
(43:40):
picking them up, we're getting to talk to him. Every
angler we got to talk to him, and that's pretty unusual.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
Keith, and the program took a lot of persecution from
all sides. Here's Jeff.
Speaker 4 (43:55):
It was really controversial, and I can imagine it was
really device not only with the public, but also within
the Wallet Department.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
There's a lot of because people were like, hey, you're
making this illegal for us, but y'all are doing absolutely
what we can't do absolutely, And how did that go down?
Speaker 5 (44:14):
Like?
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Who?
Speaker 4 (44:14):
The best way I know to explain that is, look, okay,
if you go catch. Clay Newcombe 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 the North American model is
all the wildlife is owned by the people, by the people,
(44:37):
but it's managed by the state. Okay, so if you
process the eggs and you're pocketing all the money. If
the Waldleife Department processes the eggs and sells them, everybody's
benefiting from it.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
So they take this caviaar and every day they're getting
all this caviart. So they have got to have like
government sanctioned processing facilit these ye like you know, if
they were butcher me to be the USDA, maybe it's
the USDA. And then how are they selling it? They
got a little roadside shop on the are No.
Speaker 4 (45:09):
It was all. It was all sent out for bid,
just like any other just like any other state generating commodity.
It was Okay, we've got x x number or x
pounds of caviar and we're going to sell it to
the highest bid.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
So so it went up to open bid, and who
would who would buy this? Would it be like New
York Caviar House.
Speaker 4 (45:29):
Or Japanese bought most of it. Really, the Japanese, I
think right up to the end they were the biggest
purchasers of it.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
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.
Speaker 4 (45:44):
The first year, it was just it blew everybody's mind away.
It was like just short of twenty pounds, I think, Wow.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
And all this money goes back into.
Speaker 4 (45:53):
All that money, all that money went back into the
into the research.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Like specifically paddlefish.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
Research, and and so the paddlefish research didn't cost that much. Yeah,
So with that money, they put in access areas for fishermen,
they built boat ramps. I mean, it went back into
the fishermen.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
In Oklahoma. This was revolutionary, like no game agents.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Never been done before with a game agency. And you
wouldn't believe the perception how it changed in the wal
Off 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
(46:41):
it would they were helping the Walleffe 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.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Like overall. Do you know how much money that generated
for wildlife?
Speaker 2 (47:08):
I heard a figure hero a while back that it
had it had produced over ten million. I know that
I had one year that it produced two point eight
million when I was there, and another year was over
two million.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
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 might drop ending. Keith and the
Paddlefish Research Center from day one had to have an
(47:46):
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 expert. So who do
you think Keith hired. Do you remember old Billy Ray Wishard.
Here's Keith.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
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
and but I did a nation white search and interviewed
I think of four or five people to come and
do our eggs in Oklahoma. I knew how to do them,
(48:32):
but I didn't I did I was, I wasn't a processor,
and Billy was the best screener that.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
I So Billy came to work for you at the
Paddlefish Research Center.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
Yeah, after after interviewing on nationwide.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
And he was the best.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
He was the best.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
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 ed introduced the black
market Oklahoma ended being the lead X processor in the
state for years. As Keith said earlier, Billy has since
passed away that he and Keith were good friends right
(49:14):
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
(49:36):
your friends and families, outlaws and in laws, and tell
them about the gritty American stories that you're hearing on
bear Grease in this country life. Thanks to all of you,
Let me do the math here, forty eight hundred dollars
average sized female that you caught it be worth five
grand yep on bear grease. We've made a living telling
the gritty stories of rural America, of backwoodsmen and long hunters,
cowboys and Native American leaders, law men and outlaws. I
hate to admit it, boys, but I've completely turned the
(00:29):
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
(00:49):
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 gonna
(01:11):
want to miss this one, if you can even believe
it at all.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
All these wardens converged on them. We had chuck guns and.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
It did you lead the chart you called the what'd
you say to them?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
State?
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Game warden state, that's not what you want to hear
in the in the dark anytime, is it not?
Speaker 2 (01:27):
With a batch of eggs.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
My name is Klay Nukem, and this is the Bear
Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Presented by f HF gear, American made, purpose built hunting
(02:00):
and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as
the places we explore. Phil We're gonna have to start
from the top. I think we just have to tell
them about Caviar. There's just not another starting point. Here
we go.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
I'm Alan Morris at Sterling Caviar. We're just outside of Sacramento, California.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
I'm assuming this is catching the average bear Grease listener
a little left guard Caviar, But I'll tell you this
is a foundational piece of understanding for this story.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
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 in the imperial
(03:04):
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 say, oh, yeah,
we had when I was a little kid, we had
caviar for breakfast every day in Russia, and so that's
kind of where it started.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
The Persians first called salted fish eggs kaviar, 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
(03:46):
sixteen hundreds, when the Russian Orthodox Church decided that even
though they required fasting from meat for as many as
two hundred 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
(04:08):
eighteen hundreds, the supply of sturgeons seemed endless. Beluga an
etcetera sturgeon fish native to wider Europe, is the best
caviar in the world period. Beluga sturgeons sometimes only reproduce
every twenty five years, and after centuries of commercial pressure,
sturgeon are endangered in Europe, and today it's illegal to
(04:31):
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 to 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,
(04:53):
caviar is alive and well.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
It's another jazzling Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
I'm Robin Leach with those champagne wishes and caviadres.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Robin Leech hosted the television show Lifestyles of the Rich
and Famous from nineteen eighty four to nineteen eighty five,
and coin the phrase champagne wishes and caveat dreams. But
what's all the fuss about? Does this stuff really even
taste good?
Speaker 3 (05:28):
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 palette.
And what you want to do is you're feeling those
individual beads and then as they pop, you'll get a rich,
(05:52):
buttery flavor and then a cascade of flavors. There's going
to be some bright accidity to it. I want some minerality.
I want a breath of the sea or a hint
of the sea, and also some earthiness. We call it merwar,
just like tear war and 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
(06:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
I'm sitting in the police station in Vanita, 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
sky live in Venida, a town of fifty one hundred
(06:47):
people in northeast Oklahoma. Venita 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 damned, creating incredibly fecunned lakes like Grand Keystone
(07:13):
and you fallow. Does this sound like caviar country? I
don't know. I'm meeting with retired Oklahoma game board and
Keith Green. He's in his early seventies, wiry, full of energy,
and grin's ear to ear. At the conclusion of each sentence,
will learn that Keith is a bona fide hero of
Oklahoma conservation, a pioneer. I assume this is rare for
(07:37):
a caviar expert, but in his prime he was as
good an Elk bowhunter as existed. He owns a string
of pack mules and nine bird dogs. Today he does
Keith is also an accomplished fisherman.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
My dad when we were in the late sixties, he
was loading us up with his boat and go into
Mexico to all the old Mexico lakes bass fishaw And
in seventy three I won the Oklahoma State Basque Championship
and beat Jimmy Houston. He was second. I was I
(08:13):
was eighteen seventeen or eighteen, so we bass fish.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
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
(08:38):
was part one.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
In eighty seven. It was an Iranian embargo with the
United States, and ninety percent of our caviar came from Iran,
our black caviar, so our caviar quit, we lost it,
So there was a they started looking for a substitute.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
And caviar coming into the United States yes, was gone,
was gone. So the people that were wanting caviar was
looking for another.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Source absolutely, and come to find out, paddlefish had dark
black eggs, their kin 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
(09:30):
freeze it. Battlefish caviar you can freeze, and you can
also pasteurize.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
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 polydn spathula,
also known as the spoon bill, and it has black
(09:59):
row and is one of the top caviars 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's supply had begun to create the backdrop for
some serious illegal activity for our final foundational piece to
(10:22):
begin to tell the 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.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
Paddlefish are a very unique fish and that they're prehistoric,
the cardilaginous. They don't have any hard bones in them.
The only scaleful structure is their rostrum, which is a
long snout. Other than that, they have a cartilage encased
final cord that runs the length through their body. And
other than that, there's no bone. Town They have a
(11:05):
thick hide. They have a really big area or a
streak that runs from 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 this spring, I think.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
On March seventeenth, twenty twenty four, first time paddle fisherman
Chad Williams broke the world record by snagging a one
hundred and sixty four pounds thirteen ounce paddlefish in Missouri's
Lake of the Ozarks. The former world record was one
hundred and sixty four pounds even and came out of
Keystone Lake near Tulsa, Oklahoma. The age of natural systems
(11:49):
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, ninety nine percent of
this species that have ever existed are now extinct. So
when a species outlast is peers and critics, it's worth
taking a note and tipping your hat. Here is Oklahoma
(12:12):
Department of Wildlife Fisheries biologist Brandon Brown.
Speaker 5 (12:17):
You know, paddlefish are such a bizarre looking fish. They're primitive.
They are an ancient species. They were around, or at
least the relatives were around well before the dinosaurs. Probably
the most bizarre thing about them is their rostrum, their bill,
and a lot of people used to think that they
use that to stir up the mud and then kind
(12:39):
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 put them
in a round tank, but they glued basically plankton to
the end of wires, and those little paddle fish could
(13:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
That's pretty wild. But here's where paddlefish start to stand
out as caviar producing machines.
Speaker 5 (13:30):
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 crappie, you know, 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 fifteen or
(13:51):
twenty pounds of eggs out of her. So she's producing
about a third of her body weight sometimes into reproduction.
That is a huge metal bolic investment to think every year,
every other year, whatever happens to be, that she's literally
producing a third of her body weight into eggs.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Culsta VARs of corn with big ears make for big yields,
and giant fish with huge volumes of black eggs create
incredible caviar.
Speaker 4 (14:20):
They're long lived. They'll live maybe to fifty years old
or so. They don't reproduce till they're anywhere between six
and twelve 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's called what we call
and referred to as as your classes. We'll have a
(14:42):
pretty good good idea when the fish spond, 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 kitching are from one
year class, and so they can wipe that year class out.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Here's Brandon on paddlefish spawning.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
So we consider paddlefish episodic spawners, meaning they spawn in
these big boom or bust episodes. It's not unusual to
see at eight or even a ten or fifteen year
gap in between those spawning events. Significant spawning events episodic spawners.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
That's an insightful biological descriptor.
Speaker 5 (15:27):
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 a paddlefish country, so to speak. They once
range from Louisiana all the way up into Canada in
(15:47):
some places. But over the last fifty 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 fifty
years ago. They're expanding both in the range within the
(16:10):
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
(16:32):
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 US more fertile, you know, than.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
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. You
know that they don't spawn until March April, but the
(17:20):
row is you can make caviar out of it earlier
than what they spawn. The beluga sturgeon population in the Russia,
the Old Soviet Union collapsed from overfishing, and that caviar
market went away for the most part. And that is
(17:41):
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 twenty five to
thirty five dollars an ount, So that makes one fish
(18:02):
worth potentially quite a bit of money. It wasn't uncommon
for a fish to produce ten pounds of caviar.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Let me do the math here, forty eight hundred dollars
and yeah, an average, average sized female that you caught
that had ten pounds of caviar would be worth five
grand yep.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Wow. And that's just the caviar.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
And some people 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.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
That's a big money for a fish. 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 nineteen eighties. So here's what
(18:57):
we know. Caviar is in demand glow, but most Oklahoma's
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 caviard get discovered. Jed's oil got discovered when
(19:20):
someone shot a gun into the ground. Here's game Warden
Keith Green.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
There 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,
(19:46):
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 were
they had always been able to take paddlefish commercially on
(20:07):
Grand Lake with nets, and we started seeing them really
targeting paddlefish. They never targeted it before because it's not
it's not that it's not as good as flat 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
(20:27):
we kind of caught window 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 that I know,
those people at Claremore and and they were pretty well
going to the same market that we found out.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Over these these are just Oklahoma's.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yeah, these were, but they were connected for out of
state because of the muscle picking, and the muscle pickers
were the netters, and so it happened nationwide.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
This Frank Hale out of Tennessee was one of the
first major paddlefish caviar kingpins in the US, and he
started in the late nineteen eighties. In two thousand and four,
he'd be convicted of eleven charges in relation to the
Lacy Act. There was an article written about Frank Hale
and his caviar in the New York Times in nineteen
ninety and Oklahoma and Billy Wishard was a muscle picker
(21:27):
who commercially gathered muscles and learned about paddlefish caviar from Frank.
You gotta remember Billy, he'll be a major player in
this story. But also know that commercial fishing was outlawed
in Oklahoma in nineteen seventy four. This is also an
important part of the story, so there was no legal
(21:47):
way to sell paddlefish eggs in Oklahoma.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
In Oklahoma, we do not have commercial fishing like they
do up and down the Mississippi River Ohio River areas,
and those commercial fisherman will target paddlefish, 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.
(22:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
So there was no regulation on how many you could take.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
It's been kind of a progression when I first moved
to this area and we started really working them hard
that we had a fish 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, catching release. That in
and up self led to problems. If a person caught
(22:43):
a paddlefish 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 learned more, I say we, as
the waldleyfe Department learned more about the paddlefish, some rule
changes were made to restrict sport take. You know, all
(23:05):
we have is sport fishing, and it's progressed up to
today where it's a two fish limit per year and
that's all you can take is two fish per calendar year.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
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
(23:40):
market spoonbilt caviar. Now, my friends, we have a solid
foundation to understand the dynamics for the early years of
this illegal activity. I now want to get to know
game Board and Keith Green a little better. And here's
some story of busting egg poachers. And not to foreshadow
(24:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
The best thing that probably ever happened to me was
my game warning career. I loved every minute of it.
I was My dad was pretty much of a poacher,
he really, Yeah, he got to hunt one day a
week and that was on Saturdays, and he would be
quill hunting. We'd started in the morning, quit in the evening.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
He took advantage of that day of that day and.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
We're hunted the same places for thirty years, you know,
and never heard. He knew what he would 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 me in when I become a
game warden and I got a degree in wallife. He
called you from an Oklahoma university and you think, well,
(25:02):
it helped you catch them, And it did that, but
it also helped my mental state towards somebody doing a
violation just because they were doing a violation, they were
in a no good sorry center of it, and so,
and that's that's what happens to a lot of game wardens.
You're lied to by everybody, and you see these guys
(25:23):
doing things wrong, and 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 even the guys that
I caught. And you'll find out in this story here
(25:45):
the guy that I ended up hiring with the guy
that I had 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 ours,
night after night after night after night after night. Finally
got him and his brother had done some other stuff
(26:08):
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, any time
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 had completely converted him.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
The man whom Keith would later hire to help him
catch Oklahoma poachers was Billy Wisherd, the one who initially
started the black market trade in Oklahoma before nineteen seventy four,
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
(26:50):
world of illegal wildlife trade. But by the time Keith
caught him, the agency was way behind.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
And we were so far behind eight ball. The poachers
got on it. You know, they say, let's say it
started in eighty seven, maybe it was ninety five before
we knew it was ever raping our legs.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
So in eighty seven is when the embargo happened and
caviar wasn't coming into the United States, and that for
like eighty years, it was like the wild West. It
wasn't a lot of regulation.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
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 how many eggs thatts of eggs
you could have. Yeah, you could take it out of
the eggs out of state.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
There's just anything goes. For eight years, the black market
caviard trade ran wild and pretty much unnoticed in Oklahoma.
Then in nineteen ninety five 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
(27:58):
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 Wishard.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Him and his brother. They had nets out and they
would go 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 ten horse fifteen horse motor,
and he would cross the lake and go to where
they had their nets out, and one guy would run it.
(28:37):
The other guy would drive the truck around almost forty
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, stick it in
(29:00):
the back of their pickup and uh it would it. Actually,
they kept left the tailgate up and the would set
it in there like that.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Uh, with their fish. They would have their fish in
the back of the truck.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Gigs. They were throwing the fishing with eggs.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Oh, they were just taking the eggs, chunking the fish.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Absolutely, and uh, there's a guy there that they were
on a real real road down the east east side
of Fort Gibson Lake. Well, there was one house down.
Then the guy got off at twelve to one o'clock
and he was coming home and he called another game
warding down in district too. He said, hey, there's been
a boat. I've seen it twice in the back of
(29:36):
a pickup come out of here. So he called me
and I said, well, I'll go down.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
And now why was he suspicious of that boat?
Speaker 2 (29:44):
One one at one am, two am in the morning.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
That wouldn't be unusual for just a cat fishermen or something.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Not a boat stuck in the back of a pickup,
not on a trailer. No, it was just 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. Wouldn't go with me? And
we hid the truck off on a on a road.
We're sitting there and we're on the back tailgate of
(30:10):
the truck just being quite listening, and you're a motor
And we sat there and he was idling that little
tin horse for about the last mile and his brother
come in on the on the 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'd
(30:33):
heard the motor. We had crawled out through these cucko
burr flat and the cucko birds were about this tall
the guy and we're pretty big. And this road comes
down and circles around just like this, right in front
of this kucko bird 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
(30:55):
gone and gotten the open and we laid down on
those cucko birds and I know his butts sticking up
above those cucobirds 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 the guy
is stopped out about. The water was real shallow flat,
and he'd stopped out about seventy five yards from the
(31:18):
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 forty
five yards from them, and they're they're getting stuff and
loading the boat up and putting the motor in underneath
the boat. And I didn't see I didn't see anything
(31:40):
that I thought that they could have had eggs in
and the Gordon, I was with you, because you want
to get him I go. No, I said, we're going
to let him go. And that's a hard thing to do.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
And you suspected they were getting eggs.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Though, no question about it. Yeah, yeah, there's no reason
for him to be out and no rods, no tackle,
there's no doubt they're net and they've got ice boxes
that they didn't have eggs. The boxes they lifted them,
they were light and we let them drive off. That's
that was really hard not to hopefully you might get
something on them, you know. Yeah, So the next night
(32:17):
Jeff I took Jeff Brown y'all just talk 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
(32:39):
I find this out later. You know, something spooked them
from the night before. Somehow or other. We spooked them
a little bit, but that 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 willow tree in the water.
It's about this deep, and I've called out in by
that whillow tree. And uh, you got to have your
(33:01):
walkie talkie turned off if it makes it sound, you
know that. So we're sitting there and I watch them
bring the nets out the out of the boat. They
set them on a big rag and then they just
tied the four corners together. And he reached in and
got an ice chest and he could just it's a
big old these are big old guys. He could barely
lift it over the side of the boat.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
You know. It's full eggs, no doubt.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
And so I'm just whispering. I turned them knocked down 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, they I didn't
feel like they would try to hurt us. There are
some guys I felt like that would that would come
from out of state, that would try to hurt us. Yeah,
(33:45):
so all these wardens converged on them with shot and
we had shotguns and you know it.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Did you lead the chart? You called the Yeah? Yeah,
what'd you say to them?
Speaker 2 (33:54):
State game warden?
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Stay? That's not what you want to hear in the
in the dark anytime, is it not?
Speaker 2 (34:00):
With a batch of eggs? And so I ended up
going back. They let us search where they live.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
They had an okay, so you confront them and they
just gave up absolutely again And what did they have.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
These are friend I mean people you're acquainted.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
With absolutely and know them well.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
So you walk up in the dark and shine your
light and you're like Bill.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
They knew my voice when I said, state game Ward.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Wow, how much value did the eggs they had right
that day? You think they had a couple thousand dollars
worth of.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Egg Oh yeah, yeah, at least that. But let's say
they had seven or eight fish and seventy or eighty
pounds of eggs.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
So the finished product of that caviar would have been
like thirty five bucks an ounce, But for them, like
the raw caviar would have been less. Been like a farmer,
like an absolutely and there was a cornfield. He's not
getting the little.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Eggs, so the buyer could kind of rake them over
the coal anyway. They wouldn't tell us who their buyer was.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Now, how did you did you interrogate them?
Speaker 4 (35:07):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Absolutely, yeah, I question them and and he wouldn't get
give up his buyer.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
So Keith has now caught Billy Wishard, 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.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Said, hey, said a legal caviar buyers buyers, So you're
working undercover, you know them.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
I'm putting word out to somebody that I think they'll
get back to them.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Okay, And what did you what did you want them
to hear?
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Yeah? And I I actually told Billy about something. And
I was at a national symposium Chattanooga and sat down
with one of these and I said, this buyer was there,
and I went over 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
(36:13):
were taking illegal legs. It was the exact thing that
I'd told Billy, no question. Now I know who his
buyer is.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
To be crystal clear, Keith is at a fancy dancy
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 Wishered, and later this
lady relayed the secretly coded information back to Keith, which
(36:43):
indicated to him that she was in contact with Billy.
That's some fancy lawwork, brother. Here's more with Billy's route
to justice and redemption.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
And so the fans are working them anyway, and I
didn't know this. So we get with them, and I
fly Billy down to Tennessee. We do a profer with
the US attorney. He goes, uh, And a proffer is
that you tell me everything and I won't arrest you
for any of it. You don't.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
This is the guy that you caught yes on Fort
Gibson Fort Gibson.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
And if you miss something, then we're going to come
back on you. So he spilt the beans.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
He told who his who was buying the caviar from him.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, And like I say, I got to be really
good friends with him, and and and he and he changed.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Were they making a lot of money like this? Billy goes, okay,
I can tell you.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
When we went down and did the proffer, Billy the
first question he asked, He goes, iris going to come
back on me? He goes, well, how much we talking about?
And this was for about half of the spring. He goes, oh,
maybe two hundred thousand.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Oh wow, So he had made two hundred thousand like
that year.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Half of the spring half?
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Ah wow, this is like big money.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
No, it's it's it's a lot of money.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Oh absolutely, And my mouth kind of dropped a little
bit because I didn't know it was that much.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
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 Wishard would
work for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife in their state
(38:40):
of the art Paddlefish Research Center. Yes, that's right, I said.
They built a paddlefish center in two thousand and eight.
And guess who was the lead man that pioneered that
whole program. It was our man, Keith Green. The next
part of the story is almost unbelievable and one of
(39:00):
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.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
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 it the same time, the Wildlife Department wanted to
initiate a study on these paddlefish because their uniqueness, because
(39:34):
of their value, needed to know more about it. So
Keith Green, who was a game warden, 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
(39:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
So what people caught them.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Them for them.
Speaker 4 (40:25):
Well, a byproduct to 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 it
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 wallet department, we'll sell the eggs to pay
(40:46):
for the facility and the research. And it was really controversial.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
To make again crystal clear what's happening here and its significance.
Here's the layout. Commercial fishing is a leg 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.
(41:16):
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
(41:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
We got it built and run the first year, and
we did it for five hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
We told them it would take a year and a half.
We told the Walife Commission that it would probably take
about a year and a half to break even on it. Well,
the first year it produced one point five million and
so from the sell of eggs, and it was a
(42:14):
pretty hard deal. He wanted, 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.
(42:35):
It's illegal for anybody to sell their eggs. They could
use them for fish bait, they could make caviar at
them if they wanted. This was a volunteer program. But
they would bring their fish in and donate the eggs
to the Waife Department. But while while they were doing that,
we were going to pull both jaws out of the fish.
We're going to get the link of the fish. We're
(42:56):
going to get the weight of the fish. With the jaws,
were to be able to age them, and we can
start looking at our population of fish in the lake
a lot better and explain that to him, and it
was still that, well, we're the Walleffe Department. We shouldn't
be selling commercial stuff eggs. Yeah, And finally I brought
(43:19):
the point up that every penny's going back into the
general fund of the Walleff Department. It wasn't going anywhere else.
Every deer that we have in Oklahoma, we sell it
for twenty dollars apiece. You go buy your license for
twenty dollars. You go buy your turkey tag for ten dollars.
And when these people are bringing these fishing or we're
(43:40):
picking them up, we're getting to talk to him. Every
angler we got to talk to him, and that's pretty unusual.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
Keith, and the program took a lot of persecution from
all sides. Here's Jeff.
Speaker 4 (43:55):
It was really controversial, and I can imagine it was
really device not only with the public, but also within
the Wallet Department.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
There's a lot of because people were like, hey, you're
making this illegal for us, but y'all are doing absolutely
what we can't do absolutely, And how did that go down?
Speaker 5 (44:14):
Like?
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Who?
Speaker 4 (44:14):
The best way I know to explain that is, look, okay,
if you go catch. Clay Newcombe 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 the North American model is
all the wildlife is owned by the people, by the people,
(44:37):
but it's managed by the state. Okay, so if you
process the eggs and you're pocketing all the money. If
the Waldleife Department processes the eggs and sells them, everybody's
benefiting from it.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
So they take this caviaar and every day they're getting
all this caviart. So they have got to have like
government sanctioned processing facilit these ye like you know, if
they were butcher me to be the USDA, maybe it's
the USDA. And then how are they selling it? They
got a little roadside shop on the are No.
Speaker 4 (45:09):
It was all. It was all sent out for bid,
just like any other just like any other state generating commodity.
It was Okay, we've got x x number or x
pounds of caviar and we're going to sell it to
the highest bid.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
So so it went up to open bid, and who
would who would buy this? Would it be like New
York Caviar House.
Speaker 4 (45:29):
Or Japanese bought most of it. Really, the Japanese, I
think right up to the end they were the biggest
purchasers of it.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
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.
Speaker 4 (45:44):
The first year, it was just it blew everybody's mind away.
It was like just short of twenty pounds, I think, Wow.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
And all this money goes back into.
Speaker 4 (45:53):
All that money, all that money went back into the
into the research.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Like specifically paddlefish.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
Research, and and so the paddlefish research didn't cost that much. Yeah,
So with that money, they put in access areas for fishermen,
they built boat ramps. I mean, it went back into
the fishermen.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
In Oklahoma. This was revolutionary, like no game agents.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Never been done before with a game agency. And you
wouldn't believe the perception how it changed in the wal
Off 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
(46:41):
it would they were helping the Walleffe 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.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Like overall. Do you know how much money that generated
for wildlife?
Speaker 2 (47:08):
I heard a figure hero a while back that it
had it had produced over ten million. I know that
I had one year that it produced two point eight
million when I was there, and another year was over
two million.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
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 might drop ending. Keith and the
Paddlefish Research Center from day one had to have an
(47:46):
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 expert. So who do
you think Keith hired. Do you remember old Billy Ray Wishard.
Here's Keith.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
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
and but I did a nation white search and interviewed
I think of four or five people to come and
do our eggs in Oklahoma. I knew how to do them,
(48:32):
but I didn't I did I was, I wasn't a processor,
and Billy was the best screener that.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
I So Billy came to work for you at the
Paddlefish Research Center.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
Yeah, after after interviewing on nationwide.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
And he was the best.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
He was the best.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
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 ed introduced the black
market Oklahoma ended being the lead X processor in the
state for years. As Keith said earlier, Billy has since
passed away that he and Keith were good friends right
(49:14):
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
(49:36):
your friends and families, outlaws and in laws, and tell
them about the gritty American stories that you're hearing on
bear Grease in this country life. Thanks to all of you,
Host
Clay Newcomb
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