Sitting in a federal courtroom Thursday, listening to prosecutors outline the cases against five watermen who pleaded guilty to poaching striped bass to supply a black market, was like reviewing an indictment of slipshod work by Department of Natural Resources officials.
Some examples:
* Commercial check-in stations were allowed to be run by people who had records of fishing and crabbing violations.
* Watermen weren't required at the end of the season to turn in surplus tags used to mark their catches, which prevented anyone from checking tags against catch reports.
* Tags weren't marked with the year.
* Striped bass caught in stationary nets, called pound nets, were being tagged with hook-and-line tags. Since pound netters received 25 percent of the annual commercial allocation and hook-and-liners and gill netters received the rest, it's easy to see how the system could be gamed.
* Employees of the agency - even Fisheries Service and Natural Resources Police officers - were allowed to hold commercial licenses and striped bass permits.
Certainly the sloppiness of DNR officials' cutting corners is no excuse for the greed and lawlessness of the watermen and fish wholesalers who took millions of dollars worth of striped bass from the Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River.
But a lot of the loopholes used by the guilty were knitted from 2003 to 2007, which matches the time period of the federal poaching investigation. And now DNR is scrambling to repair the damage.
"The rules changed five or six years ago. If you look at these arrests and look at the dates, this is when it started happening," says Larry Simns, head of the Maryland Watermen's Association. "They were trying to save money, and they took the lock off the door. Watermen looking for an edge can figure it out real quick if there's a way to make money off it."
During those four years, the lieutenant governor declared that watermen wouldn't have anything to worry about, Natural Resources Police changed superintendents three times, the number of officers shrank and a commercial waterman without a science background was named deputy fisheries director.
Now, sometimes Simns and I exchange heat-seeking missiles in lieu of Christmas cards. But in this case, it's important to note that before almost anyone was aware of the trouble brewing in Southern Maryland, Simns began making noise about hanky-panky going on with pound net and hook-and-line tags. Not in some private place, but at meetings of the Tidal Fish Advisory Commission.
