‘Codfather’ will never fish again, after fake Russian mobsters took him down
Carlos Rafael was made on the waterfront. For decades, the balding seafood magnate haunted the docks and early-morning fish auctions in New Bedford, Mass., where he had gone from gutting fish as a high school dropout to controlling one of the largest fishing fleets in the United States. Though he estimated his net worth at $10 million to $25 million, he still walked the creaky, bait-scented wharves in flannel shirts and worn jeans every day, barking out commands and alternating between foulmouthed English and rapid-fire Portuguese as he chain-smoked Winston cigarettes and monitored the day’s catch.
That all changed in 2016, when federal authorities revealed that Rafael was at the center of a sprawling criminal investigation involving fake Russian mobsters, fraudulent haddock and duffel bags of cash. Now 67, Rafael will never fish again, according to the terms of a settlement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that was announced Monday.
It’s the latest chapter in the downfall of the man known as the “Codfather,” who is serving nearly four years in federal prison, and, under the new settlement, owes the government more than $3 million in fines.
Under the circumstances, getting out of the fishing business was the right choice, Rafael’s attorney, John Markey, told The Washington Post. But it also amounts to a significant sacrifice for the seafood tycoon, who wasn’t yet ready to retire. Up until the day Rafael reported to prison, Markey said, he still went to work on the docks each day at 6 a.m., driving a 10-year-old pickup truck.
“This is what he enjoyed doing,” Markey said. “It was a part of him.”
Until the law finally caught up with him, Rafael looked like an all-American success story. Born to a farming family in the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the Atlantic, he was sent to live at a monastery at 12 because his parents feared he would be drafted into the colonial government’s wars in Angola and Mozambique. As a teenager, Rafael desperately wanted to move to the U.S., he recalled in a 2004 oral history. But his father was hesitant, so Rafael forced the issue by getting himself kicked out of the monastery. Knowing that their son would almost certainly be conscripted if they didn’t leave, Rafael’s parents agreed to move to New Bedford, a historic whaling port where nearly a third of inhabitants claim Portuguese ancestry.
Arriving in Massachusetts at 15, Rafael dropped out of school after a week, finding the lessons too basic — “they’re telling me dog, cat, fork, knife” — and got a job making linguica, a smoked Portuguese sausage. That, too, didn’t last long: He quit after four days when he was told that he couldn’t take frequent smoke breaks. In his 2004 oral history, Rafael recalled that he told his boss, “Look, the American Dream that I wanted wasn’t this, to come and make linguica and I cannot even go for a cigarette after an hour’s work [...] You keep your linguica and I’m leaving.”
New Bedford consistently ranks as the most lucrative commercial fishing port in America, so it was perhaps inevitable that Rafael would end up finding work on the waterfront. He started out as a fish cutter — gutting, cleaning and deboning fish as soon as they arrived on the wharves — and worked his way up through the ranks to become a foreman. By the early 1980s, he had saved enough money to buy his first boat and start his own business, Carlos Seafood.
In the years that followed, one boat turned into several dozen, and before long, Rafael was sitting at the head of a massive fishing empire and controlling about a fifth of the New England cod market. His success was puzzling to some, given that the industry was hurting badly: Overfishing had depleted the supply of groundfish like cod and flounder, and the federal government responded by imposing strict regulations on commercial fishermen. Meanwhile, many of Rafael’s business dealings raised eyebrows — he was sentenced to six months in prison for tax evasion in 1984, indicted but ultimately acquitted for price-fixing a decade later, and later pleaded guilty to forging sales receipts in 2001.
“I think they love to knock you down,” he complained in his 2004 oral history. “It looks like it’s deliberate when they do things like that in the system. If you do well, you not supposed to do well. I guess it’s like it’s against the law if you’re successful.”
Rafael didn’t like having to follow rules about where his boats could go and what they were allowed to catch any better than he had liked being told when he could take a cigarette break at the linguica factory. He once compared federal fisheries regulators to the Gestapo, and in 1994 predicted that new, conservation-minded laws would either force business owners like him to go bankrupt, or turn them into outlaws, the New Bedford Standard-Times reported. He chose the latter.
“I am a pirate,” he told a group of federal regulators. “It’s your job to catch me.”