It is almost overnight, So they just showed up. They just showed up.
Were y'all immediately suspicious of that?
Yeah.
On the last episode of Bear Grease, we learned about the black market caviar trade in the United States and how the number one source is the American paddlefish, an ancient beast older than the dinosaurs that can reach up to one hundred and sixty pounds, and females often produce up to twenty percent of their body weight in black eggs, almost worth their weight in gold. We've learned about how the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife created a controversial program that
allowed anglers to donate their eggs to the state. Then caviar was made and sold on the legal market to raise money for conservation, and it raised over ten million dollars. But this week we're transitioning in the chronology of the caviar black market, and the players were completely shocking to me. It was none other than the Russians. This is a wild story about the cultural value of caviat and what
some people were willing to do to get it. I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one, and I want to let you know that soon you'll be able to watch video. That's right, video of the Bear Grease Render Podcast, which is our every other week podcast where we dissect the actual bear Grease podcast. I know it's confusing. All this you'll be able to see on meat Eater's new YouTube channel with just podcasts on it.
Brent will be there in his overalls, and I'll probably be wearing a coonskin cap, probably even have some music too. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Onto the episode.
They knew we were watching them, We knew they were watching us, and we'd go down and sit down on the bank and just talk to them. You know, they are jolly people, a lot of them.
It's just a man. They wanted them paddlefree schick.
They wanted that caviar at all costs, and it's kind of like we ever doing it. Catch us if you can.
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 lived their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the
place as we explore. On November twenty seventh, nineteen eighty five, America's awareness of the Cold War with the then Soviet Union reached an all time high after almost forty years of jockeying for global power in this ideological and geopolitical struggle. That November date was the release of a hit box office movie, bo Gets out of the Corner Island.
Now, What's moves?
Driver backing Rocky Babo up with a jab, and Balbolla is not staying on.
That is because in a long job of.
The Russian.
Tiger, Rocky four starred Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, the virtuous, simple, tough as nails American hero pitted against the villainous antagonists. Actor Hans Lundgren planned the tall, ridiculously good looking and jacked Russian boxer Ivan Drago, who had killed Apollo Creed. It was an epic battle portrayed as good versus evil, especially if you lived in America.
Driver, continuing to punish Rocky balbois the throng. Rocky Balboa, who's on the corner like a rag tod on to firstwe minutes to Rocky Balboa. He's not only fighting what appears to be an invincible opponent, he's.
Also fighting a very hostile cloud. It's been a one sided fight so far.
You need to take more than that.
If you recall, Rocky had agreed to fight the Russian in Moscow. Adrian. Rocky's wife knew that that was a mistake, and most of us did too. The viewer spends most of the film anxious about Rocky fighting this guy in Russia, wondering how he's going to pull it off. Now, it might be a stretch to say that this scene played out in real life in Oklahoma in the two thousands,
just the roles were reversed. The fight took place in the USA, But the boxers in the Ring of the Black the Arctic Caviar World were from the former Soviet Union, and we'll learn that often the Oklahoma game wardens and federal agents pitted against these Russians in this boxing match on the River felt like they were box and Ivan
Drago an almost unbeatable foe. But to go back a little more into real history, not Hollywood history, the Soviet Union would collapse in nineteen ninety one, and the ripples would roll into Oklahoma's fisheries.
Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. General Secretary Gorbachev.
If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate, Mister gorba Open this gate. Mister Gerbashov teared down this wall.
The last thing on Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev's mind was how tearing down the wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union would affect the biologically rich American rivers of the Midwest, teeming with the ancient polydon spathulah, the majestic spoonbill, or the paddlefish. It seems like it might have been the first thing they considered, but it wasn't. I'm joking, But it's interesting when global politics intersect wildlife management,
and it did just that. We learned that a trade embargo with Iran and the collapse of the Soviet Union essentially shut down the sturgeon caviar coming into the United States. Sturgeon caviar is the best in the world. K caviar had been important cultural staple in much of Europe for over one thousand years. Their rich, sturgeon filled rivers had made caviar as common on the tables as butter in
many areas. That's true, and because of that, it made its way deeply into the culinary and even religious culture of Europe. But the rivers were overfished, sturgeon populations collapsed, trade embargoes came on the world, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the world was now looking for a new source of black caviar. That is the pivot point of this whole story, and it didn't take them long to learn
about our unexploited Midwestern rivers rich with caviar. But these Europeans weren't the first ones to illegally trade paddlefish eggs in Oklahoma. On the last episode, we heard about a bunch of good old boys from Oklahoma doing it. The stuff can be worth up to thirty five dollars an ounce, which adds up to over five hundred dollars a pound. This stuff is expensive. We also learned that paddlefish caviar is in the top three to four caviars in the world.
The demand was there. This black market American story starts in the late nineteen eighties when paddlefish caviar first began to be exploited and illegally sold to fill in the gaps left by this global caviar vacuum. You'll remember game Warden Keith Green on the first episode talking about catching Billy Wishart on Fort Gibson Lake and the incredible story of redemption of Billy later working with the Department as their lead legal egg producer. That was just part one
of our story. Jeff Brown is a retired Oklahoma game warden. He's an incredible guy and a legendary lawman in the Sooner State. He spent his career protecting Oklahoma wildlife, but in Eastern Oklahoma, a paddlefish were the dominant player in his career. Here's Jeff introducing us to Operation Russian Snag.
We really got ramped up and started and started Operation Russian Snag. That was that was the you know the federal government, federal agencies, they like to put names on everything. So we come up with with Operation Russian Snag and that started in about two thousand and eight. It had been going on we'd been working on for a couple of years, so let's say two thousand and five through twenty fifteen.
So from for about a decade. Yep, it was hot and heavy.
It was eighteen it was eighteen twenty hours a day as far as I know, with the exception of one fishery up on the Missouri River. And there's no other place you can sport fish for paddlefish like you can here in Oklahoma.
So it all had to do with the regulation. And this is kind of the paddlefish hub of the US, is that right?
Yeah, at the time, we had a we went through a progression of limits, so there was a period of time there where you could catch a fish a day, so you could care if you fished every day, you catch three hundred and sixty five fish. Well, they would show up with ten or fifteen people and that's how many fish they took.
That.
It was a.
Collaboration between the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the ODWC Oklham Department Wildlife or Enforcement Division. It was just a concerted effort to address this group of fishermen and try to figure.
Out just exactly what was going on.
We knew that there was commercial nexus there, we weren't one hundred percent sure what it consisted of.
It's tricky business in modern times telling the true stories of how things actually happen, especially when it involves other nationalities. Oddly, in twenty twenty four, telling the story that places Russia in a fairly negative light is socially acceptable because of the general disapproval in the West of Vladimir Putin and Russia's war against Ukraine. I've even heard that Brent Reeves' squirrel hunted with Putin. That's not true, but you should
see my Instagram meme. It's hilarious. But seriously, it's not lost on me that if this story was about another nationality, perhaps it would be viewed as inappropriate to directly talk about the offenders and make assumptions about their culture. I'd just like to say from the start that I'm certain I don't fully understand the dynamics of the situation, these people's culture and their motivations, And my starting place is an assumption that the majority of Russians residing in the
United States today are hardworking, honest people. But in this story, a select group of them, we're breaking the law, and that's an interesting story, so we're going to talk about it. Here's Jeff.
I started September one, nineteen eighty five, went to work as a game warden for the Wildlife Department. They shipped me to western Oklahoma and I stayed out there five years. I'm from this part of the state, from down around Tulsa, So the first opportunity I got, I moved back close to home. I've been here in this area since September of ninety and immediately was immersed into the paddlefish wars.
As we officially called them.
We spent and I say we, I mean game wardens in this district overall in the springtime. That's all we did was paddlefish work. That's all we did. You know, we'd make literally thousands of cases a year just on paddlefish. You know, people not tagging their fish. You have to tag your fish, you have to fill out a recorded game, you have to check in your fish, people catching over limits, the whole gamut. But most of our work was done
on paddlefish enforcement in this district. At full Staff District one, which includes northeast Oklahoma. Here ten counties in the northeast, which ninety percent of the paddlefish resources and where the sport fishing takes place. At full staff, they're including the district captain. There was seventeen of us and man, it was all hands on deck for three months. That's all
we did. There was one one year there where we I want to say, there was like twenty some thousand paddlefish permits were issued and the very next year that doubled in size in the number of battlefish.
In the nineteen nineties and.
Eight it is when we really saw the paddlefish caviard deal really coming into play.
So in the nineteen nineties, most of your violations with paddlefish were just just recreational fishermen, just like catching too many fish. Yeah, then you started to see actual poachers taking their paddlefish into Arkansas.
In the nineties, we saw that going on too, but it was local people doing it. So we started really paying attention to people poaching paddlefish for their caviar and caught several groups resident people who were doing just that. We had some laws introduced and passed that were made it illegal to possess over so many pounds of caviar. And when that happened, we didn't have to wait for
them to leave the state. As soon as they loaded a vehicle up and looked like they were running, as soon as they got on the interstate like they were headed out. We would stop them anywhere from an eighteen wheeler. We've stopped eighteen wheelers and gone through them, and they'd have the caviar hidden underneath the vegetables and a roofer truck or whatever. We just unload them on the side of the highway and take their caviar and ride them
a bunch of tickets and let them go. There's a whole progression there when we kind of waded through the locals. We called them above is affectionately, just for lack of anything else, you know, the local guys we kind of got all. So that waded through, caught all of those that we knew the players, and sent some of them to prison. Some of them were some bad actors, but we.
Went some to prison. So some of these guys were violating.
Oh yeah, yeah, or or put so many restrictions on them that they couldn't fish anymore, maybe suspend their fishing license, you know, made it so that if they showed back up on the riverbank, they could get in trouble.
In the nineteen nineties, most of the paddlefish violators, including egg poachers, were locals, and the department felt like they had the situation under control. But in the early two thousands they took notice of an interesting change in demographics.
In one year, it went from like twenty some thousand paddlefish permits issued to like fifty thousand. It doubled in one year. Wow, we went through the through all the
paddlefish permit holders. It's one thing good about it. We go through there and compared our numbers to the number of Eastern Europeans that had a paddlefish permit, and it was like at one time its high as like five hundred Eastern Europeans had paddlefish permits from all from various states all over all over the United States are coming here. So you know, that's something we realized we was up against.
How did you first did you come aware? I mean, is it just like a game ward and walking down the bank checking fishing license talking to people And for decades since the dawn of time, it was people from Oklahoma that your meeting, and all of a sudden you shake hands with the guy from Russia.
Yeah, and they and they've got Russian sounding names. I mean, for lack of a better way of.
Having, did that like phase in or was it just like all of a sudden, It's just like the officer, did you realize that half the people we talked to they were Russian?
It was almost overnight.
So they just showed up, They just showed up. Were y'all immediately suspicious of that?
Yeah, And it's a cultural thing to them, you know, it's a big deal. And they they would and we talked to several of them, and they tell us all the all the healing properties and and how all the great things that that, how good they were for your body, you know, to eat these eat these fish eggs, and they loved it.
It's just it's clear that it meant more to them in their culture than it did in ours.
Oh.
Absolutely, So they were willing to sacrifice anything they found, like a bird nest on the ground when they came up.
And up until then, all the all the local people we dealt with was taking the pattlefish and and running it through uh commercial fishermen in other states. They weren't using it themselves. The Eastern Europeans. Not only were they catching it for themselves, but they were catching it for all their extended family. There were there were big Russian communities and cities. And the way it was put to us by other federal agencies that we contacted to help us with this was that you know, they were as
a community, they were real tight. All the Eastern European community in Tulsa had real tight connections to all the other Eastern European communities and vice versa. And when the when the Soviet Union disintegrated as as a block, a lot of these people were displaced. They immigrated to the United States to get away from persecution or whatever whatever they were doing, and the old Soviet Union wasn't going
to work for them anymore. And they immigrated to the United States and with that they brought their culture, and part of that culture was with caviat and they found a really ready source for it, and man, they started exploiting it just overnight.
I wonder how much awareness they would have had, because you know, people coming out of the Soviet Union going to different big cities in the US, and these people end up in Tulsa and they and they start working and doing what they do and maybe have business or whatever.
And then I wonder how aware they were if they were like, man, spoon bill populations are good in the Midwest, especially over there in Oklahoma, let's move there, I mean, or if it was like they just ended up in Tulsa by random chance, let's say, and then they're like, holy cow, the hill abilities aren't using the eggs?
Yeah, you know, no, And that was a big part of It's kind of like all of a sudden, somebody threw a light switch on and they realized what they had or what they were close to.
Yeah.
Well, then the Eastern European community in Tulsa would bring in members from other Eastern European communities and other states, and we started seeing lots of Colorado people, lots of people from Minnesota.
We made some good cases on those from the Northwest.
These people had relocated in various big cities, and when they realized that Oklahoma had caviar and the game was on, they were on it.
They were on it.
A lot of it was for their own personal consumption, but then they started peddling it amongst themselves.
A lot.
We noticed that when they would come here and they would they would line the bank and be fishing and say a local person down the creek there, down the bank there caught a paddlefish, and they'd go over there and try to buy it from him. We knew that we had a problem, and we was trying to get ahead of it, and and it took a long time.
And what we found out is that we were fighting a losing battle and the only way we were going to get this stop probably was to legislate it to the point of where it would make it too hard for him to do it.
Like Rocky Balboa, by the start of the second round with Drago, he knew he was in trouble. So did the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife. Here's some more details on how the paddlefish wore proceeded.
Starting out, there were we identified three different groups or family groups that we felt like we're really involved in it, and they were in the Tulsa area, and even to the extent that people would not come, people that came from out of state would go through them. They would either either stay with them while they were here or or took direction from them, and we would we would just sit and watch them fish. And one particular group, there were several family members they would show up on
the river bank and it was all business. They had some of the Somebody was in charge of fishing. Somebody was in charge of checking the fish when they got it to the bank to see whether it had eggs in it or not. Another one was in charge of ripping the eggs out of the fish. Another one was in charge of getting the eggs to the truck. I mean it was an assembly line. Once those eggs made it to a vehicle, man, boom, they're gone. And they
had counter surveillance. They would have vehicles that would run interference. They knew that we were watching them, and they would have vehicles that would cut us off when we were trying to follow them. They went out of their way not to get caught. When all this started, we went to the FBI to see if we could get some help, and they weren't interested in helping us because there wasn't enough money involved.
It wasn't a big.
Enough fish for them to fry, so to speak. But they did tell us say, look, we're not surprised at all because and it had to do with the system they were brought up in, you know, the old Soviet block. That's how they if they wanted to be affluent and have money in the old Soviet block, they had to learn how to scheme the system. And they brought that with them to the United States.
Wow.
And you know, and we go back to talk about how organized they were. There was one particular ular guy that we kind of recognized as the king pin out of the whole thing. And there may be some Eastern Europeans that would come down here from Minnesota or whatever, and so and so would be on the bank down there. Every Eastern European who was here fishing would go and for lack of a better word, and pay homage to him. They would go up to him and someone would bow
to him. Really yeah, And and come to find out that a lot of these people were real big in the Russian Orthodox Church. And I think this guy was a church leader.
And and so y'all noted like from your surveillance, like that guy, everybody that comes here is going to that guy, going to go watch how they treated him.
He was.
He was the daddy rabbit for somehow, some way, you know, he either found.
Was he not a focal point of the investigations?
Yes, absolutely, did you ever catch him? No, Some of this people, some of the people. Now, no, he probably got some citations for doing He probably got some citations for violations. But as far as he facilitated everything, as far as we could tell, the eggs that went to Seattle were his group.
Yeah, his group.
There was a big paddlefish caviar bust in Seattle that had a lot of Oklahoma eggs in it. Okay, let's play a little game here. So Eastern Europeans come to rural Oklahoma. Game wardens are watching them that they stand out because they're from a different culture.
Oh, you could, you could, you could see them. We would look. Our vantage point was across the river. The river right there was real wide, so they're a half mile away. We'd have to watch them with binoclars. You could pick everyone of them simply by the way they were dressed.
Oh really, yeah, really yeah, how would they dress?
A lot of them wore workout clothes, jogging apparel, cut suits, or they'd be mismatched, badly mismatched.
Really yeah, you could just you could just peek.
Pick them out.
Very rare, very rarely, very rarely could we not wow, But but you could look across there and say, yep.
Rush, and you just you just knew it is it? Okay, So let's let's this plays right into my game. So let's say the roles were reversed and that people from rural Oklahoma went to Russia and we're doing something some illegal fishing in Russia. Okay. So when you're watching these guys through binos, they're going to this kingpin and like kissing his ring and bowing to him, and you know, they're doing whatever, and their culture makes sense for them
to do to the big dog. What would what would how would the Russians pick out the rural Oklahoma's over there.
There again, probably by the way they were dressed. Yeah, yeah, camo and yeah, real real tree camo. It's it's funny and this that that made me think of something. So when all this was first really getting ramped up and went to the Feds, and when we got to have some help, well they brought in Feds from all over the country, and there was about ten or so of them showed up one day that the federal agents, and they're going to go down and go fishing with them.
I kind of see what's going on. They picked everyone on them mount.
The Russians picked out the agents.
Every one of them really to the point that they finally said, we're doing no good here, We're leaving.
Wow.
Yeah, even went up to them and said, we know you're the police.
Picked them out, picked them out.
Wow, that's right. We corned. The phrase sticks out like a fed at a.
Snagging hole, sticks out like a fed at a snagging hole. I like that. That's funny. That's what we'd call getting the tea, as the young kids say these days. And I don't want to generalize too much, but it seemed clear from all the information they were getting, even from the federal government, that this group of people knew how to get around systems.
The Eastern Europeans. They knew what they knew. We were watching them, and they were watching us. One incident in particular, we were going to try to set a pole camera up on one of the places in Tulsa, and a lady come outside and she knew exactly what was going on.
She knew what we were doing.
It was a utility company out there putting this pole camera which looked like I mean, you can't tell it's a camera to look at it. It was a camera made it look like a actually made it look like an electric transformer or something.
Anyway, she picked up on it immediately.
What'd she say?
She come outside and looked up here and said, what are y'all doing? And you know that business dried up? I think we used it, just maybe some background. We were told by the FBI that some of these people, if they've got a hand in it, they have made their living getting around the rules, and they come by it honestly because that's what they had to do. In the old Soviet Union. We had spreadsheets of phone numbers
and there would be a phone. There'd be a phone that's registered to this your eastern year pen, but this guy uses it and seemingly they're not connected, but yet he's using a phone that this guy pays for.
And there's a lot of that.
And I had a whole bunch of names at one time that was using an analyst in Washington, d C. She worked for one of the federal agencies. And I called her on the phone. I don't remember her name now, and I said, can you check these peoples out for me?
Yeah?
So she called me back. She goes, what are y'all doing? And I told her. She goes, this is the bad of the bad. So I don't know what y'all are getting into. So, but these people are on lots of different agencies, you know, radars. She knew, she didn't know them, but she knew the names.
And these were people down here Capilar fishing. Yeah, that's interesting. Here's Jeff describing the overall strategy of Operation Russian Snag.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service had been brought in as a partner on this, and they took the lead. And what they wanted to do was let these eggs go and hoping that they could find where they were going on the other end, to kind of cut the head off the snake, so to speak, which was a good idea in theory, but it was so hard to be able to get that done. When I say we, I mean that I was in charge of Loose Lee along with Matt Bryant, the federal agent here in the
state at the time. Together we kind of ran this task force and followed eggs all the way to the Seattle area Portland, followed eggs to Denver area, trying to figure out where they were ending up. Where they were going had some success. Followed one group of eggs all the way to New York City, got up there lost them,
but we knew that's where they ended up. Well, just a few days later, that same group of eggs we knew, We knew right down to the pound, how many eggs they should have, knew how many fish they caught, how many eggs, how many pounds of eggs those fish should have produced. The Canadian government confiscated those eggs going over into Canada. We weren't able to make the case on it.
The Canadian government wasn't interested in it. They took the guy's eggs, but they didn't fall charges on him, and the US attorney was reluctant to fall charges on them under whatever circumstances.
Was there any pinnacle charges brought on any one particular person that would be like the hallmark of Russian snag, just like we got these guys.
Yeah, there were.
Like I said, when we finally started side decided that we were not going to start keep letting these eggs go out of state. We started stopping when we got some substantial fines off of some of them. We stopped a vehicle over on I thirty five, headed up into Kansas and eventually over the Denver area. They had three hundred and some pounds of processed eggs of caviaar if they ended up.
Paying over one hundred thousand dollars rough the caviar.
And they ended up they ended up paying almost twenty thousand dollars in fines and restitution.
What happened to the caviar? You confiscate that three hundred punds of what happened to it?
As far as I know, it was kept as evidence for a long time and then it was disposed of. Really, yeah, we couldn't.
Not even a single dip of the cracker into it.
H No, you know, and I wouldn't.
What would become instrumental in actually being able to catch and convict paddlefish egg violators would come down to a simple change in the law, which was spearheaded by Jeff. It seems like stuff like this would be easier to do, but sometimes the systems just aren't that nimble. However, the problem was almost completely solved with one simple change.
At that time, if you wanted to catch a paddlefish, you had to go to the Grand River System to do it. At the same time, all this was going on in the Wildlife Department and the US Fish Wildlife Service was reintroducing paddlefish into a lot of different lakes. Ulagall Lake, which is right here close, was one of them. But all the lakes in northeast Oklahoma now have viable population and paddlefish in them. So now that pressure is being spread out over the whole northeastern part of the
state as opposed to just one river system. Well what that did is maybe take some of the pressure off that Grand River system, but it made Game Warning's life that much harder because now instead of us being able to concentrate on a particular river system, now we had it going on all over at Call Lake, at Uligul Lake, at Keystone Lake, you follow lake just everywhere Navigation Channel.
I went to the Wildlife Department in about two thousand and thirteen or fourteen, said we got to have some help, so we can't do this anymore, and I met a lot of resistance. My proposal was we shut snagging down at nighttime, after dark, we don't want any snagging. Well, we can't do that because you know, we're taking away opportunity from Joe fishermen. So there's no family out there at midnight paddle fishing, so it's not happening. If they're doing it. You know they old adage if it's if
it's happening after midnight, there's no good in it. There's a lot of truth to that, man. They just really really fought against it, and finally we come up with a compromise. We're in northeast Oklahoma. We made it illegal to fish snag for paddlefish from ten o'clock at night to I think at six o'clock in the morning, with the exception of one place. That one thing did more than anything to shut this down or at least at least keep it where we could keep a keep a
lid on it. Because if they couldn't do it under the cover of darkness, they were.
Going to do it.
That validated our already suspicion or what we knew to be is that they weren't sport fishing. They were doing it for the eggs and the egg only. That's how important it was to us. It's a unique fish, it can and is exploited, and that's one way that I really pushed this rule, this regulation change to our fisheries people. As look said, historically, the game ardens in this part of the state. We've dedicated our life to protecting these fish.
If you want that level of protection to continue, we've got to make some real changes because we cannot as a group keep up this pace. That's all we did for twenty hours a day for sixty ninety days out of every spring, and I went ten fifteen years and never got into the Turkey woods because it happens at the same time in Oklahoma, we've got big sam bass fisheries and sambas fishermen went several years without ever seeing a game arden because we were concentrating on powdlefish because
they are so susceptible to exploitation. Anytime, and this is my belief wholeheartedly. Anytime wildlife and money are involved, wildlife loses every time. I mean, you go back to the turn of the century, and that's what got us in the position we were in. It was the commercial harvest of wildlife and that still goes on today, not on that scale, but absolutely if left unchecked, you know, the wildlife comes out on the short end of stick every time.
So finally we got some rules changed, and the biggest thing is that they now could not do it under the cover of darkness. Now what that did for is is for the game warden is before we'd have to sit on them all night long and wait for them to make a violation. Well, if they couldn't be there to begin with, that made our job easier because and it happened some.
We still worked all night.
But if we saw somebody snagging and we didn't have to wait for them to violate, they were already, they were already in violation, we just go get them. Yeah, and it didn't take very much you that, I'm gonna say two years in.
We've got good. We had good compliance.
A lot of a lot of those Eastern Europeans there again, they knew we were watching them. We knew they were watching us. And we go down and sit down on the bank and just talk to them and they you know, they are jolly people, a lot of them.
Yeah, it's just a man. They wanted them Battlefie sings.
They wanted that Cavia at all costs, and it's kind of like, yeah, we're doing it. Catch us if you can. And you know, we finally got to where we could in it and it hurt them some.
I want to ask Jeff a question I'm compelled to ask almost every law enforcement officer. I encounter. Did you ever feel in danger or anything and doing your undercover work with any of this.
Not with the Russians, so to speak, they always felt like they had their apprehend and they did actually. But with the Bubba's there was some some of that bunch with that were dangerous and there was there was one particular guy that I had a big party in arresting. We put him in prison. He had been arrested a few times before for the same thing over the years. Uh. We followed him the Sylum Springs. As soon as he
crossed the line at Sylum Springs, we arrested him. He was a convicted felon, and we knew everybody knew that was one person that if we ever if he ever caught you right by yourself, it.
Was a gunfight. But we what'd you get him for? Paddlefish? Oh?
He was dealing in eggs?
Yeah, he I was. I was sitting I was sitting on his house. One night. I sat on his house.
He lived in an area and and I got dumped out along with other people several several nights over two or three years, until finally one morning I was sitting on his house and here comes a pickup and they start loading ice chests in the back of it, and I radioed Keith and I said, we're on and we got everybody. We got everybody rounded up and followed him the Ring Spring or Silent Springs. As soon as he
crossed the line in Thesylum Springs, we stopped him. He was a convicted felon and what we ended up sending him to prison for is that he had one shotgun shell in his vehicle, which violated his probation.
Oh wow.
And even though all that stuff and he wouldn't get him on anything, he went to prison because of that one shotgun shell. Really, well, we didn't care and we didn't care how we caught him, as long as we caught him.
What's what's wrong with the system when you can't really prosecute real criminals? I mean, like as a as a game board, and who has committed your life?
And you know, and and I can make sense of it only this way. Why life isn't that big of a deal to most prosecutors and judges.
And I understand it.
You know, you've got people that are murdering, raping, you know, robbing, stealing.
Yeah, if you're looking at the high.
If you're looking at the high, if you're.
Looking at the hierarchy, powder fish smuggling is what down here.
I get cut. I get that.
Over the years, we've had some good prosecution locally when we would catch some of these these guys with eggs and we would stop them, you know, we quit letting them go out of state, and we would stop them and and take their eggs and stuff. We got some good prosecution on them. But on a big scale, if that is my opinion, if that attorney needed to was going to have to invest a lot of time in figuring it out, it.
Wasn't worthing to really.
Yeah, Now, if we brought if we brought him up, if we brought him a case that was locked solid, we caught him, here's the eggs, we wrote him these tickets, max him out.
He's all about it.
But if it was something like a conspiracy deal or some big long investigation that he was going to have to weed through a stack of papers.
That thick, it wasn't gonna happen. Wow Wow, And.
It's still that way today, And it wasn't only pati fishs just that way.
Think that's an injustice or do you feel like that's just part of the game.
That's just part of it.
So you don't get your feelings hurt by that.
No you can't, Yeah you can't.
But people that like us, that like you, like like me, like the people that value wildlife so much and have dedicated a big section of their life. Like when I hear about a paddlefish criminal, I mean, that's like high level offense.
You know, it is.
It is a game. It's interesting to hear you say that. I've never had anybody sell me that as good as you just did. Yeah, most people's radar, this is not that big of a violation to society. And yeah, and that's hard, that's hard for me to hear because you know, we love all this stuff so much. It's a big part of our lifestyle.
There are some prosecutors and some judges that are wildlife or outdoor people.
They're hunter and fishermen.
They get it, and consequently we would get better cooperation from them. Honestly, there's not that many of them that are like that, And especially on the federal side, they've got they've got so many on the federal side. They're dealing with the bad or the bad and uh and a paddlefish. It's like the guy that we caught in Sylum Springs with the eggs and he had that one shotgun shill that that used attorney was all over that because that's a that's a big deal. He by a lady,
just federal probation. So we're sending him back to the pen. Eggs that is, that's immaterial, you know. And we didn't care why he went back to the pen. We just don't even went back to the pin. Got him out of our hair for a little bit. Yeah, and he came out of the pen. So he come out of the pen too old to paddlefish anymore, and that was a blessing to us. But he was he was a dangerous individual.
It's hard for me to wrap my mind around serious wildlife criminals not being treated by the judicial system as legit criminals. But really, I don't know if that's good or bad. Should someone be able to have, let's say, a life sentence for a wildlife violation, and with all the problems in the world, and as thinly stretched as all our law enforcement and judicial systems are, I guess it makes sense. I just don't really like it, because wildlife is so important to me and my culture, our culture.
Probably if you're listening to this, I'd like to wrap up this series by one last conversation about caviar. I'm really intrigued by and at the time of this recording, I've never eaten caviar. It's scarcity, it's financial cost, its perception is a status symbol of wealth and luxury. Is endlessly fascinating to me, kind of like mules in my culture. Mules are kind of like the caviar of the hillfolk.
But I have one more question. Let me ask you about consumption of caviar kind of in the United States. That would be when I think about wildlife resources and eating wild game and eating fish we catch, there is not caviar in my cultural rolodex of stuff that we would eat like It wouldn't even if I caught a big fish that had a bunch of fish eggs in it, that would be the last thing that I would want
to eat. Are there people in Oklahoma that is that somewhere in the cultural knowledge of people to eat caviar. So basically the Eastern European and kind of the wealthy elite that ate caviar have influenced absolutely people where they get it. And so you think there's a lot of caviar fans in Oklahoma.
No, No, it's the more influential crowd. Kind of a status deal, I guess, and that would be clear. But people who are like that have the money to go buy it anyway. You can buy paddlefish caviar on the legal open mark all day long. Most of it comes from legal sources. Some of it is illegal sources that's been laundered through legal.
Where could you go buy paddlefish caviar?
Could?
In New York City? Could you buy paddlefish caviar?
Yes, there are caviar shops.
One of them is I've been to New York City one time in my life and it just so happened accidentally walking down the street and I look and there is a caviar shop, and I recognize the name on it because it was one of the names that had come up in our investigation and stuff. Even a lot of this unlawful caviar ended up in legal caviar shops, and the Fish and Wildlife Service has been working on a way to do DNA testing on caviar to tell where it comes from, to tell what watershed did it come from?
You'll remember retired Oklahoma game board and Keith Green from the last episode. He's a caviar expert. I had one last question for him. How do you eat it?
What do you what?
Do you eat it on a cracker?
Yeah, if you really taste you have.
To put your pinky up in the air when you hold the cracker.
If you're really tasting testing it, and you want to know what it's really tasting like.
But take this a little bit out and put this a little bit right.
Here and put it on your thumb.
Yeah, maybe fifteen eggs.
Do you think that caviar it has become a cultural phenomena here with the local people?
No? Why we're just too redd in it? You know, I've bet.
If it's so good? Does it not? Would I? I've never had it? Would I not? Like why it seems like it's people make such a fuss about it. It would be good anywhere, you know what I mean?
Yeah, but here you got people cleaning fish every day and they're throwing away all the eggs, and they've seen those eggs thrown away, And how can you eat fish eggs?
How can are you? Are you kidding me?
I'm really interested in this caveat. We're going to try to get some Oklahoma caveat. Where can we get it? Well, it's ending right now, can we buy it something? It doesn't exist anymore. There is no Oklahoma caviar anymore. Really, so right, we can't buy it anywhere now.
You could have last year at this time.
How do I get it?
Then you don't?
You got to catch you catch a fish and make it yourself.
Really yeah.
What Keith means by it ended last year is that they've shut down the Paddlefish Research Center, so the state no longer deals commercially in paddlefish eggs. Their creation of the program was never about money, and after almost fifteen years of research, they had all the data they needed. So the program that Keith pioneered has come to an end. It only seems appropriate to me to end this series with one of the greatest American speeches of reconciliation ever made.
I came here tonight. I didn't know what to expect. I wish it can get your mate a dream. I see a lot of people hating me, and I didn't know what to feel about that. So I guess I didn't like you much.
Not either.
During this fight, I've seen a lot of changing.
The change.
The way you felt about me and the way I felt about you.
Is meaningless.
In here there were two guys showing each other. But I guess that's better and twenty.
Million, So you have to move? What's dollars? What else?
Trying to say it? If I can change, you have to move, and you can change.
We move.
Everybody to change.
I can't thank you enough for listening to bear Grease. Please leave us a review on iTunes and share a podcast with your friends and family and tell them about the wild stories you're hearing on Bear Grease and Brent's This Country Life. Truly, we appreciate you guys listening to us, and we love y'all. Don't forget about being able to watch the Bear Grease Render podcast on Meat Eater's new YouTube channel.