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Thread: Outlaws

  1. #1
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    Default Outlaws

    Hunting waterfowl brings a steady share of dummies to game wardens

    Len Lisenbee
    March 26, 2021

    Dumb outdoor crooks seem to be the most popular topic that I cover in this space. They are some really dumb actions by some really dumb yahoos.

    The fact they are stealing fish or wildlife that belongs to everyone doesn’t even enter into their feeble brains, at least as long as there are “sports” willing to pay for their services.

    This story, like all of the individuals mentioned here, are real-life characters that a visit to my official diaries actually occurred while I was employed as a federal game warden, just a few years ago.

    Hunting waterfowl is a great challenge, especially if you're on the wrong side of the law.

    Bo Bo Hanson was no run-of-the-mill waterfowl guide. He was a legend among all of the guides and hunters in his part of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. And boy, did he ever like to kill Canada geese!

    He took out one party of two men on a cold, snowy December day. They hunted in a hedgerow blind at the edge of a cut cornfield. There were a hundred or so decoys set out, and Bo Bo brought along an assistant guide, “Chalk-eye” Brown, to help him call in the birds. The four individuals began hunting around mid-morning.

    Before the hunt, Bo Bo met his clients and they had breakfast together in a local restaurant. They were both eager for a good hunt, and asked him all sorts of questions. And soon the conversation turned to his past encounters with the law.

    It seems that he had been busted by some federal game wardens a few years earlier, and had only recently got his hunting license back.

    But Bo Bo was not to be deterred from his primary love in life. He assured both clients that he now had a method that assured he would never get caught again. The federal judge had warned him that he should bring his toothbrush, not his checkbook, the next time he appeared in that courtroom, so he was very careful about selecting his clients.

    He told them he relied on his gut feelings to tell him whether a perspective client was an undercover game warden or an “honest” sportsmen. And, he told the two anxious nimrods, he would never again be caught with an over-limit of geese in his possession.

    Once in the blind, those two guides made some beautiful music on their goose calls. The geese began flying out to feed just a few minutes after they got set up in the blind, and they managed to turn flock after flock with their “flagging” and calling.

    The shooting was hot and heavy, and soon the daily limit of eight geese had been reached by the four hunters. When one of the clients asked him if they should pick up the decoys he told them to hide all of the dead birds in the hedgerow some distance from the blind and then keep on hunting.

    More geese dropped from the sky. Another limit was reached, and those birds were also hidden in the nearby bushes. And still the four men kept on hunting at the guide’s insistence.

    Finally the clients declared that they had enough birds, and the hunting ended. After the equipment was stored in the trucks, Chalk-eye pulled out a sheet of paper from his wallet and began making out tags for the geese. The paper contained names and license numbers from past clients, so the tags appeared legitimate when the geese were taken to a nearby picking house.

    Well, as you might have guessed, those two clients were a little bit more than they appeared to be. Yup, they were both undercover federal game wardens. In fact, one of them was me. And Bo Bo got the bad news via a registered letter.

    They say he stayed drunk for five days after reading that he had to appear before the same federal judge to answer to the charges of taking an over-limit of geese and about a half-dozen other violations.

    He showed up at the courthouse and came face to face with the two feds. He got a sheepish grin on his face and admitted they sure fooled him in a big way. Then he assured them that he had come prepared, pulling out a brand new tooth brush from his coat pocket.

    With that he entered the courtroom to face the music. I can only wonder if he wore that toothbrush out during the next six months?

    ***

    Tom Willett was another old-time waterfowl guide in the central part of the Eastern Shore. He swore he would never be caught in a serious violation of the waterfowl regs again because he faced total revocation of all of his hunting privileges if he was.

    And he was totally unaware that his two clients were the same two that Bo Bo had taken out.

    When they reached the goose blind set on the shore of the Choptank River, the geese could be seen sitting on the water 500 yards out. There were at least 20,000 of them, and they were making a loud racket as they talked back and forth with each other. What was even worse, they made no effort to fly out to feed.

    When they reached the blind, the two clients watched Tom fill his shotgun with lead (toxic) shot. They were using steel shot, and he informed them to bring along some lead the next time. Then he began calling and flagging in an attempt to attract any geese that might fly to the blind.

    Two hours later none of the three men had fired a shot. That’s when a Maryland State Game Warden stepped out of the bushed and walked to the blind. He found the lead shot in Tom’s gun real quick, and took him back to the state vehicle so a citation could be issued.

    Tom returned a half-hour later, grumbling about the $275 those three lead shot shells had just cost him. He then picked up his shotgun and reloaded it with ... three more lead shot shells.

    By the end of that long day the three men, assisted by some other guides and clients of the outfitter that Tom worked for, had managed to kill an over-limit of geese. All of those other hunters were using lead shot, too. And, the blind where they finished the day’s hunt had been baited with whole kernel corn.

    Tom Willett appeared in federal court to answer to the charges placed against him. And, as he told the two agents just before court began, he couldn’t figure out who among the hunters he guided was the fed. He told us he never suspected us for an instant.

    When the magistrate-judge heard that Tom had reloaded his shotgun with lead shot after just being caught using it by the state officer, he was not a happy person. In fact, I hope I never receive a look like the one he gave Tom at that moment.

    And, when the gavel fell, Willett probably felt the same way. He had to pay a pretty steep fine. And he had to be a guest of the federal government for a while, too. And, (worst of all) he lost all of his hunting privileges for five years, the longest such suspension ever given in that courtroom up to that time.

    ***

    One of the funniest of the dumb outlaws I had the opportunity to meet had to be Willie Bower. Old Willie enjoyed bragging about just about anything, and he always had a better story than any his clients might tell him. He was sure funny that way.

    When one of his clients happened to mention that they had just barely escaped being caught in a baited area on the Choptank River the previous season, old Willie told them that they were currently hunting in a baited area at that moment.

    But, he quickly cautioned, there was no chance the game wardens would ever catch them because he was far too smart for that.

    They had a heck of a hunt that morning and the next, taking a double limit of geese and a number of out-of-season ducks. And the clients enjoyed watching Willie put out his bait, a plastic baggie of corn he carried to the blind in the game pocket of his jacket.

    “The birds eat it all up before the wardens can get a sample,” he told me over a hot cup of coffee after the first hunt. “And I stay right here to make sure that they do.”

    To this day I still believe he was the smartest of all of my dumb outdoor crooks. I actually miss old Willie.

    Len Lisenbee is the Daily Messenger’s Outdoor columnist. Contact him at lisenbee@frontiernet.net

    https://www.mpnnow.com/story/sports/...ns/4769796001/

  2. #2
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    “Halt: I’m a Federal Warden” is a great book and full or stories like this.

  3. #3
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    Hunter of Bad Hunters: Poachers Are His Bag

    By Hank Burchard
    July 28, 1977

    For 30 years the man has been living a lie, and he is proud of it. He has gone skulking through marshes slaughtering protected waterfowl, he has gunned down endangered species with professional poachers, he has bought bald eagle claws and feathers by the bushel on the black market. His countless game law violations would be worth several long lifetimes in federal prison because there is virtually no outlaw hunter's dirty trick he hasn't pulled.

    And in fact his companions on these illegal hunts usually have wound up henind bars or paying stiff fines, because this mild-mannered, innocent-seeming man of middle years is the top undercover agent for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

    Agent Holstead, as we shall call him - because that is his real name, and he hardly ever uses it - has engineered rude surprises for thousands of scofflaws from Chesapeake Bay to Hawaii, form Alaska to Key West and from Maine to the Rio Grande.

    On a given Sunday morning he may be crouched on a California ridge with guides who have promised to produce an illegal Rocky Mountain goat; the following Friday he may be buying a smuggled Bengal tiger skin at a fancy Les Champs shop in the Watergate complex.

    "The only place I can be pretty sure I won't be iat home," Holstead said during an interview in his Washington office. "A Fish & Wildlife agent can only be as effective as his wife will let him be, because you can't enforce game laws on a 9 to 5 schedule, and you can't ever promise to be home on a given day. That just isn't fair, and if she can't accept it, you'd better take up another line of work. It is an unthankful and impossible job, and nobody can stick it without cheerful support from home.

    "These investigations take an enormous amount of time. There are only 180 federal game agents to cover the entire country," Holstead said, spreading his palms over the stacks of paper before him, "and a lot of those are desk jobs.

    "You have to do a lot traveling, you have spend long afternoons around potebellied stoves in crossroads stores gaining the local people's confidence, you have to spend long days and nights out in the fields with binoculars, you have to spend day after day in court. If your wife isn't willing to put up with that, you can't do the job. I an blessed with the finest wife any man could ask for, and kids who understood why Daddy was never home."

    The children are grown and gone now, but Mrs. Holstead had to do without her husband for much of the past three winters while he led an undercover investigation on Virginia's Tangier Island that led to the largest and most successful raid in the 92-year history of the service. Island guides were offering unlimited shooting, in and out of season, at anything that flew, to hundreds of hunters from all over the country.

    Tangier has been a trial to state and federal game agents since market hunting was outlawed in the late 19th Century. Some of the islanders never have been reconciled to limits and seasons set by mainland bureaucrats, and since nearly everybody there is related to nearly all his neighbors, those who do obey the laws protect those who don't.

    "It's even tougher now that all the watermen have CB radios," Holstead said "Tangier is way out there in the Bay, surrounded by open water and flat marsh, and they can see a stranger coming for miles. Everything is thrown overboard or buried long before you even get close. You can catch one or two at a time by coming in fast and low with a seaplane, but to get solid evidence on something as large-scale as they had going on there is no substitute for agents in place."

    Holstead visited the island time after time and winter after winter until he was familiar as an old shoe, never once making any of the tiny slips that would have given him away to the islanders, who for generations have handed down the fine art of sniffing out federales. Other agents, including women, came and went, but Holstead abided.

    "I love those people," he said. "They are splendid. They nursed me once when I was sick, they took me into their homes, they are some of the finest people in the world. I didn't enjoy having to turn them around like that, but this thing had been going on for eight or 10 years, getting more flagrant all the time. I don't get too excited about a man shooting a few illegal ducks for his dinner, but this kind of commercial slaughter is disgusting.


    "Just in the three winters I was there I estimate they killed off at least a third of the canvasback and redhead ducks (both protected species) that overwinter in the lower Bay. I sat in a blind and watched two hunters kill 70 redheads on one day. Lots of hunters were shooting birds they had no idea of eating: they'd just gun them and let them drift away."

    To play his part Holstead had to join in killing protected birds. "I popped a lot of caps, but my wing shooting falls off something terrible in a situation like that," he said. "Anyway, everybody was firing at the same time, so the fact I was shooting to miss wasn't too obvious."

    The raiders, 28 agents in small boats and light planes, swarmed onto Tangier before dawn in a January icestorm, collecting thousands of illegal birds and issuing hundreds of citations, including one to Holstead, who make his way back to the dock at Crisfield, Md.

    With him he took film of dozens of hunters who had posed proudly with their illegal bags, along with memorized observations of the details of scores of violations about which he could not safely take notes. Later he exchanged letters and pictures with doctors and lawyers and other pillars of various communities whom he had met on the island.

    "When I was learning my way into undercover work I used to worry a lot about how to sneak along a camera, because there is nothing that will convice a jury like a picture," Holstead said."Finally I learned that the thing to do is hang the camera aroung your neck; everybody assumes you're a tourist, and sometimes a poacher will beg you to take his picture.

    "They really felt betrayed when our agents showed up to serve summonses on them," he said. "Somehow I don't feel too bad about it. I'm used to being despised by poachers who thought I was their friend. My daddy was the game agent in charge of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and I used to take beatings at school all the time because of it, from boys whose fathers he had arrested.


    "To do this sort of work you have to measure yourself from inside, and the thing that counts with me is that I have never led anybody into doing something illegal, I have just taken what was offered.

    "Our game laws are damn near impossible to enforce anyway, and you're lucky when you can nail somebody tight enough for it to stand up before a local jury. It's getting better, but a lot of people still have the attitude that the game will always be there and it's their right to take whatever they want.

    "For some of them the game laws are just that, games that they play with the law; they care more about beating the law than the hunting."

    For all that he has to spent most of his professional life among slob hunters and traffickers in illegal pelts, Holstead's view of the average hunter is far from jaded.


    "I think most hunters obey the laws," he said. "I also think about 70 to 90 percent of them would violate the law from time to time if they were really sure they could get away with it. Hell, a man saves his money and his vacation time to go hunting and maybe he gets blanked for three days; then on the last day he limits out, he's packing up and then comes another flock . . . Our job is to keep that doubt in his mind.

    "Perhaps the most serious problem is ignorance. Ignorance of the law in some cases but mostly ignorance about the species they're hunting. I don't think one hunter in 10 can distinguish legal from illegal birds on the wing. A man will come into the dock holding up a couple of brant and ask you if you're ever seen a finer pair of black ducks.

    "What bohers me the most is that the outlaw hunters play into the hands of the anti-hunting groups, and the situation is getting worse all the time. People hear about hunters shooting polar bears from airplanes and Congressmen hunting over baited fields and they join up with the anti-hunters. Seasons and bag limits already are unreasonably low for many species in some areas, and the animals are in serious trouble as their habitats shrink. It isn't hunting but highways and sub-divisions and pollution that threaten most of the endangered species.


    "If it goes on like this, the time may come when all hunting will be outlawed, and then only starvation and disease will keep wild populations in check. That would be a cruel and a criminal waste.

    "But the hunters don't police each other. In all those years that the Tangier operation was going on we got two complains from hunters who were disgusted by what they had seen on the island. Two complaints, out of God knows how many hundreds of hunters who knew about it."

    Holstead will be retiring at the end of the year, and he's looking forward to it. "The service is changing," he said. "A lot of our agents now are not hunters, and they don't understand people like the watermen. An effective law enforcement officer has to know how and why lawbreakers do what they do, and the only way to learn it is to live it.

    "One of the toughest cases I ever made was a duck trapper out on Assawoman Bay. I worked on that old devil for weeks before I caught him cold with a couple of mallards, one of them a banded pen-raised bird released in Pennsylvania. He defended himself in court, with a local jury, and he did a beautiful job of it, but I convicted him.

    "Afterwards, I was sorry. He wasn't a commercial trapper, he wasn't hurting the duck population, and he had as much respect and affection for wildlife as any man I've ever met. He was a good man, a better man than I am, and he became my good friend. He taught me a lot. He made me a better hunter and a better game agent, and I still go hunting with his grandson."

    "I've tried telling that story to young agents, but they don't get the point, and beside, the way the game laws are written an agent doesn't have much latitude for exercising his own judgement anyway, even if he has any."

    Holstead leaned back in his swivel chair and smiled. "I guess it's time for this old boy to get out of here and let somebody else worry about it."

    His retirement plans?

    "Oh, I'm going to do me some hunting, just me and a good friend or two, out there with the wing and the water."

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/archi...-8c5868d794db/

  4. #4
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    The undercover agent written about above, wrote his memoirs after retirement. Great book if you haven't read it...


    https://www.amazon.com/Undercover-wi.../dp/B011SK52BM

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