00:00:05 Speaker 1: 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 helm of the ship to something bizarrely off topic on this episode. Caviar salted fish eggs of certain species are some of the most expensive per ounce food in the world. They're a status symbol of wealth and luxury. But is that really why I'm interested? Have I derailed us? Or could this be a story where rural America collides with a global caviar trade in a bizarre crime ring. I guess you'll have to wait and see. But this story from the heartland of Oklahoma is full of giant fish net poachers, undercover agents, and a region turned upside down by black market caviar. I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one, if you can even believe it at all. 00:01:14 Speaker 2: All these wardens converged on them. We had chuck guns and. 00:01:18 Speaker 1: It did you lead the chart you called the what'd you say to them? 00:01:22 Speaker 2: State? 00:01:22 Speaker 1: Game warden state, that's not what you want to hear in the in the dark anytime, is it not? 00:01:27 Speaker 2: With a batch of eggs. 00:01:38 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:02:22 Speaker 3: I'm Alan Morris at Sterling Caviar. We're just outside of Sacramento, California. 00:02:30 Speaker 1: 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. 00:02:43 Speaker 3: 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 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. 00:03:25 Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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, caviar is alive and well. 00:05:00 Speaker 4: It's another jazzling Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. 00:05:03 Speaker 2: Thank you for joining us. 00:05:05 Speaker 3: I'm Robin Leach with those champagne wishes and caviadres. 00:05:11 Speaker 1: 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? 00:05:28 Speaker 3: 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, 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 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. 00:06:25 Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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. 00:07:53 Speaker 2: 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 was eighteen seventeen or eighteen, so we bass fish. 00:08:17 Speaker 1: Keith is one of those guys when you shake his hand, you know you're talking to a legend. But he's got some foundational information on global trade he needs to share. This is where we'll start to stitch the lifestyles of the rich and famous with Oklahoma Rednecks. This is part two of the foundation of our story. Learning about caviar was part one. 00:08:40 Speaker 2: 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. 00:08:58 Speaker 1: And caviar coming into the United States yes, was gone, was gone. So the people that were wanting caviar was looking for another. 00:09:05 Speaker 2: 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 freeze it. Battlefish caviar you can freeze, and you can also pasteurize. 00:09:38 Speaker 1: 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 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 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. 00:10:43 Speaker 4: 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 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. 00:11:26 Speaker 1: 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 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 Department of Wildlife Fisheries biologist Brandon Brown. 00:12:17 Speaker 5: 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 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 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. 00:13:22 Speaker 1: That's pretty wild. But here's where paddlefish start to stand out as caviar producing machines. 00:13:30 Speaker 5: 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 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. 00:14:10 Speaker 1: Culsta VARs of corn with big ears make for big yields, and giant fish with huge volumes of black eggs create incredible caviar. 00:14:20 Speaker 4: 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 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. 00:15:01 Speaker 1: Here's Brandon on paddlefish spawning. 00:15:04 Speaker 5: 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. 00:15:25 Speaker 1: That's an insightful biological descriptor. 00:15:27 Speaker 5: 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 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 state and also in population size and in numbers. Oklahoma really won the paddlefish lottery, so to speak, and it wasn't anything that we did as a state or as an agency. We just got really lucky. We've got enough river miles between those dams that those fish can move and go and get a spawn off. And we have very fertile, very fertile watersheds. You know, if we look at that grand system that water's coming out of Kansas, well, there's probably not anywhere in the US more fertile, you know, than. 00:16:42 Speaker 1: 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. 00:16:58 Speaker 4: 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 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 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 worth potentially quite a bit of money. It wasn't uncommon for a fish to produce ten pounds of caviar. 00:18:09 Speaker 1: 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. 00:18:18 Speaker 2: Wow. And that's just the caviar. 00:18:20 Speaker 4: 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. 00:18:34 Speaker 1: 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 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 someone shot a gun into the ground. Here's game Warden Keith Green. 00:19:25 Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 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. 00:20:48 Speaker 1: Over these these are just Oklahoma's. 00:20:51 Speaker 2: 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. 00:21:03 Speaker 1: 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 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 way to sell paddlefish eggs in Oklahoma. 00:21:51 Speaker 4: 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. 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. 00:22:19 Speaker 1: So there was no regulation on how many you could take. 00:22:22 Speaker 4: 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 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 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. 00:23:20 Speaker 1: There are seven states that allow commercial paddlefish harvest Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi. However, these markets for that caviar is highly regulated. So that's exactly why a place like Oklahoma, without the pressure of commercial fishing, became a holy land for black market 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 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. 00:24:17 Speaker 2: 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. 00:24:39 Speaker 1: He took advantage of that day of that day and. 00:24:42 Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 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 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. 00:26:29 Speaker 1: 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 world of illegal wildlife trade. But by the time Keith caught him, the agency was way behind. 00:26:57 Speaker 2: 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. 00:27:12 Speaker 1: 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. 00:27:23 Speaker 2: 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. 00:27:36 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:28:15 Speaker 2: 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. 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 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. 00:29:07 Speaker 1: Uh, with their fish. They would have their fish in the back of the truck. 00:29:09 Speaker 2: Gigs. They were throwing the fishing with eggs. 00:29:12 Speaker 1: Oh, they were just taking the eggs, chunking the fish. 00:29:15 Speaker 2: 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 a pickup come out of here. So he called me and I said, well, I'll go down. 00:29:42 Speaker 1: And now why was he suspicious of that boat? 00:29:44 Speaker 2: One one at one am, two am in the morning. 00:29:47 Speaker 1: That wouldn't be unusual for just a cat fishermen or something. 00:29:49 Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 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. 00:31:51 Speaker 1: And you suspected they were getting eggs. 00:31:54 Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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. 00:33:22 Speaker 1: You know. It's full eggs, no doubt. 00:33:25 Speaker 2: 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, so all these wardens converged on them with shot and we had shotguns and you know it. 00:33:51 Speaker 1: Did you lead the chart? You called the Yeah? Yeah, what'd you say to them? 00:33:54 Speaker 2: State game warden? 00:33:56 Speaker 1: Stay? That's not what you want to hear in the in the dark anytime, is it not? 00:34:00 Speaker 2: With a batch of eggs? And so I ended up going back. They let us search where they live. 00:34:07 Speaker 1: They had an okay, so you confront them and they just gave up absolutely again And what did they have. 00:34:13 Speaker 2: 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. 00:34:20 Speaker 1: These are friend I mean people you're acquainted. 00:34:22 Speaker 2: With absolutely and know them well. 00:34:25 Speaker 1: So you walk up in the dark and shine your light and you're like Bill. 00:34:28 Speaker 2: They knew my voice when I said, state game Ward. 00:34:30 Speaker 1: Wow, how much value did the eggs they had right that day? You think they had a couple thousand dollars worth of. 00:34:37 Speaker 2: Egg Oh yeah, yeah, at least that. But let's say they had seven or eight fish and seventy or eighty pounds of eggs. 00:34:45 Speaker 1: 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. 00:34:58 Speaker 2: Eggs, so the buyer could kind of rake them over the coal anyway. They wouldn't tell us who their buyer was. 00:35:05 Speaker 1: Now, how did you did you interrogate them? 00:35:07 Speaker 4: Oh? 00:35:07 Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, I question them and and he wouldn't get give up his buyer. 00:35:15 Speaker 1: 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. 00:35:28 Speaker 2: 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. 00:35:38 Speaker 1: Said, hey, said a legal caviar buyers buyers, So you're working undercover, you know them. 00:35:46 Speaker 2: I'm putting word out to somebody that I think they'll get back to them. 00:35:49 Speaker 1: Okay, And what did you what did you want them to hear? 00:35:52 Speaker 2: 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 were taking illegal legs. It was the exact thing that I'd told Billy, no question. Now I know who his buyer is. 00:36:22 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:36:55 Speaker 2: 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. 00:37:14 Speaker 1: This is the guy that you caught yes on Fort Gibson Fort Gibson. 00:37:18 Speaker 2: And if you miss something, then we're going to come back on you. So he spilt the beans. 00:37:24 Speaker 1: He told who his who was buying the caviar from him. 00:37:27 Speaker 2: Yeah, And like I say, I got to be really good friends with him, and and and he and he changed. 00:37:33 Speaker 1: Were they making a lot of money like this? Billy goes, okay, I can tell you. 00:37:36 Speaker 2: 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. 00:37:50 Speaker 1: Oh wow, So he had made two hundred thousand like that year. 00:37:54 Speaker 2: Half of the spring half? 00:37:56 Speaker 1: Ah wow, this is like big money. 00:37:58 Speaker 2: No, it's it's it's a lot of money. 00:38:00 Speaker 1: 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. 00:38:10 Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, And my mouth kind of dropped a little bit because I didn't know it was that much. 00:38:18 Speaker 1: 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 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 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. 00:39:09 Speaker 4: 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 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 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. 00:40:07 Speaker 1: So what people caught them. 00:40:08 Speaker 4: 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. 00:40:23 Speaker 2: Them for them. 00:40:25 Speaker 4: 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 for the facility and the research. And it was really controversial. 00:40:53 Speaker 1: 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. Catching them is becoming popular simultaneous to a global demand for caviar. The Wildlife Department had the idea to process the giant fish for free of charge in return for the anglers donating their eggs to the department to be processed into caviar and sold legally on the market by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife. This had never been done before by a state agency. Here's Keith on the first year of running the Paddlefish Palace. 00:41:51 Speaker 2: 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 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. 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 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 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 picking them up, we're getting to talk to him. Every angler we got to talk to him, and that's pretty unusual. 00:43:49 Speaker 1: Keith, and the program took a lot of persecution from all sides. Here's Jeff. 00:43:55 Speaker 4: It was really controversial, and I can imagine it was really device not only with the public, but also within the Wallet Department. 00:44:05 Speaker 1: 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? 00:44:14 Speaker 5: Like? 00:44:14 Speaker 2: Who? 00:44:14 Speaker 4: 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, 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. 00:44:51 Speaker 1: 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. 00:45:09 Speaker 4: 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. 00:45:23 Speaker 1: So so it went up to open bid, and who would who would buy this? Would it be like New York Caviar House. 00:45:29 Speaker 4: Or Japanese bought most of it. Really, the Japanese, I think right up to the end they were the biggest purchasers of it. 00:45:36 Speaker 1: 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. 00:45:44 Speaker 4: The first year, it was just it blew everybody's mind away. It was like just short of twenty pounds, I think, Wow. 00:45:51 Speaker 1: And all this money goes back into. 00:45:53 Speaker 4: All that money, all that money went back into the into the research. 00:45:57 Speaker 1: Like specifically paddlefish. 00:45:58 Speaker 4: 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. 00:46:14 Speaker 1: In Oklahoma. This was revolutionary, like no game agents. 00:46:18 Speaker 2: 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 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. 00:47:04 Speaker 1: Like overall. Do you know how much money that generated for wildlife? 00:47:08 Speaker 2: 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. 00:47:26 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:48:09 Speaker 2: 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, but I didn't I did I was, I wasn't a processor, and Billy was the best screener that. 00:48:38 Speaker 1: I So Billy came to work for you at the Paddlefish Research Center. 00:48:43 Speaker 2: Yeah, after after interviewing on nationwide. 00:48:46 Speaker 1: And he was the best. 00:48:47 Speaker 2: He was the best. 00:48:51 Speaker 1: 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 to the end. I can't thank you enough for listening to bear Grease. On the next episode, we're going to talk about a sting operation in Oklahoma called Operation Russian Snack. It has to do with Eastern Europeans and it's even more wild than this story. Please share our podcast with your friends and families, outlaws and in laws, and tell them about the gritty American stories that you're hearing on bear Grease in this country life. Thanks to all of you,

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