Waterman sentenced to 18 months

Prosecutors say rockfish scheme concealed harvest

Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2009

Robert Lumpkins, who earlier pleaded guilty to conspiring to falsely report rockfish catches, was the latest defendant in the case to receive his penalty, which also included an order on Friday that he pay a $36,000 fine and $164,040 in restitution.

Lumpkins and other fishermen falsely reported the number and weight of fish checked in at his Golden Eye Seafood business, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Overstating the number of fish caught and understating their weight allowed the watermen to get more state tags to catch more fish, to reach the maximum number of pounds of fish they could catch each year, from 2003 to 2007.

A task force of officers working undercover started buying rockfish in 2003, the prosecutors' office reports, and they analyzed reported fish catches and business's sales records throughout the five-year period, including at Lumpkins' state-designated check-in station.

"I didn't take it apparently seriously enough," Lumpkins said this week of his check-in station, adding that he would have complied with any instruction to tighten up on the accuracy of harvesting records.

"You know darn well I would have done exactly what they told me to do," he said. "Nobody wants to go to jail."

Federal prosecutors and the law officers viewed Lumpkins' misconduct as far more than an oversight, and the prosecutors filed a report before the sentencing hearing stating that he played an "instrumental role" in the scheme that jeopardized the fishermen's industry and thousands of jobs.

Michael Luisi, a deputy assistant director with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources' estuarine and marine fisheries division, concurred with a defense lawyer's description that the rockfish population in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries now is "pretty healthy" and "fully restored." Luisi told a prosecutor that accurate harvesting data is essential, however, to allow the maximum legal harvest of rockfish each year.

Without that true information, he said, "We would be forced to constrict the commercial fishery."

Sgt. John Bailey of the Maryland Natural Resources Police testified that the additional fish tags received by the fishermen were valuable to them.

"The tag is money. Mr. Lumpkins is a businessman," Bailey said. "If you get a box of money, you're going to use it."

Bailey acknowledged that some unused tags issued in 2008 were returned to the agency, but that no unused tags were considered in a conservative estimate of the illegal catch.

He said that in calculating how many pounds of fish were not reported, the average weight of a rockfish was based on their smaller size in the later months of the year.

"We could have made this huge," he said of the tally of the unreported catch.

Fourteen other people have been convicted in the investigation, and their sentences thus far have ranged from four months of home detention to 15 months in prison, according to prosecutors.

At Lumpkins' sentencing hearing last week, where prosecutors alleged as many as 200 tons of rockfish went unreported through his check-in station, his lawyers challenged those estimates and the contention that Lumpkins' misconduct amounted to a greater breach of the public trust than that of the other watermen.

"We tried to demonstrate that I'm just a waterman," Lumpkins said this week. "I'm just like the other guys, except that I also happen to own Golden Eye Seafood [and] I was the check station."

jwharton@somdnews.com