Enforcement Overkill? : Big-Game Crackdown Draws Fire

At exactly 6 a.m. on Feb. 24, 1988, Bruce Loeb was awakened by pounding on the front door of his Van Nuys home. Thinking a break-in was under way, he grabbed a handgun from his nightstand.

“Who’s there?” Loeb shouted.

“Federal agents with a search warrant,” was the answer from the front porch. “Open up.”

Loeb looked out a bedroom window. “I saw five or six guys in blue Windbreakers that said FEDERAL AGENTS on the back, and a television news crew,” he recalled.

He put his handgun away, pulled on a bathrobe and opened the front door. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents poured in. “I asked an agent if I was under arrest,” Loeb says, “and he told me ‘No, we’re just here to collect your animals.’ ”

As Loeb, his wife and 6-year-old son looked on, agents carried grizzly bear and caribou mounts out of his house. Neighbors watched and TV news cameras rolled while the trophies were loaded into a truck.

Loeb was told only that the seizure “has to do with an illegal-use-of-aircraft-while-hunting charge against you.”

Trophy on the News

That night, his bear made ABC’s “World News Tonight.”

For Loeb, it was the first chapter in a 21-month-long legal battle on which he would spend $17,000 defending himself in a federal trial on what, in a state court, would have been misdemeanor offenses. Eventually he’d pay $550 in fines and assessments.

It was a struggle he’d share with an increasing number of American big game hunters: Around the country at that hour, 16 other alleged “poachers” were being arrested or were having their animal mounts seized by federal agents. Thousands of others have been arrested on similar charges.

To the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the raids and other tactics are an essential part of stepped-up enforcement of 1981 amendments to the landmark Lacey Act of 1910, which virtually ended large-scale commercial hunting in the United States.

Hunters Form Lobby

But to an increasing number of hunters, some of whom have formed a lobbying foundation to seek congressional relief, the raids are part of a disturbing pattern of law enforcement that they say is eroding the agency’s century-old reputation as a wildlife-management partner and casting it in the role of undeclared foe of sport hunting.

They are particularly incensed by the wildlife service’s use of “sting” operations in which, hunters charge, undercover officers befriend them in the field and encourage them to violate hunting regulations.

They also accuse the agency of participating in illegal kills to facilitate arrests; of singling out wealthy, high-profile hunters for “big-shot busts,” and of building minor offenses into federal cases that are time-consuming and expensive to fight. The agency denies it is being selective or unfair.

“The procedures of these people are more in line with what you’d use to bust drug traffickers,” said Don Causey, a New York writer who publishes “The Hunting Report,” a monthly newsletter for big-game hunters.

“I mean, when federal agents can come into your home, search you, handcuff you, threaten you with $10,000 and $20,000 fines and prison . . . even if we’re talking about a guy who inadvertently travels across a state line with an illegal goose, or out of ignorance sells a bear gall bladder to an undercover agent.

“We’re talking about a Gestapo mentality,” he added. “If this subject involved any area of U.S. jurisprudence other than big-game hunters, the ACLU would be over these cases.”

Frank Dunkle, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s director until last month, acknowledged that he is “concerned” about some agency enforcement practices.

‘Mistakes’ Acknowledged

“I do understand the complaint of someone (charged by the agency) who simply made a mistake while on a hunting trip,” Dunkle said. “I have a problem, yes, with cases like that. Did he intentionally violate the law? . . . but, by the same token, a violation is a violation.”

Dunkle (whose replacement has not been named) suggested that for individual hunters, public education might prove more effective than concentrating on sting operations. But he added:

“I have no problem with undercover operations pointed at large-scale commercialization of wildlife. The guy who is not afraid to break (wildlife) law, who starts out with that intent . . . that guy has no quarter with me. My feeling is we should have him as hard as the law permits.”

Clark Bavin, the service’s law enforcement chief, denied in an interview that the agency is practicing selective or unfair enforcement.

“Without undercover work, we’d never detect violations of massive illegal commercial hunting operations,” he maintained. “Unless our people can get on the inside, there’s virtually no way we’d be able to protect those trophy animals.”

In some cases it has been necessary for agents to kill an animal illegally, he acknowledged. “There is philosophically a difference of opinion on that . . . (but) we feel it’s necessary to sacrifice an animal or two (occasionally).”

Bavin denied a frequent charge, that his agents are anti-hunter. “Absolutely untrue,” he said. “A high percentage of our agents hunt themselves. I myself am a bird hunter. The Service supports hunting as a management tool.”

Many in the wildlife conservation field give the Fish and Wildlife Service high marks for its law enforcement efforts in other areas, including its work to stem the flow of animals from rare and endangered species and illegal wildlife parts across U.S. borders.

That traffic is estimated at $150 million to $300 million a year, and agents at airports routinely confiscate from tourists illegal items unwittingly purchased overseas: crocodile boots, products made from sea turtles’ shells and ivory, ocelot and leopard skin coats, jewelry made from the teeth of great cats.

But it is enforcement of 1981 amendments to the Lacey Act (amendments initiated in part, ironically, by the hunter-oriented Safari Club International) that is the focus of the hunters’ ire. Specifically, they cite Section 3(A), which prohibits interstate transportation of illegally taken wildlife or animal parts.

“Every hunter I know would like to see every bandit hunter busted and busted hard,” says Bob Jantzen, Dunkle’s predecessor. “But that one amendment in the Lacey Act means the feds can nab a guy who inadvertently puts someone else’s pintail duck in his trunk, drives across a state line . . . and he can be looking at federal prosecution.”

Among hunters, a case that perhaps best typifies their complaints comes not from the Rocky Mountains or Alaska but from the farm country of southern Minnesota.

Les Behrns raises corn and hay on 140 acres near Wabasha, Minn. The farm is on a bluff above the Mississippi River, not far from where Chippewa and Sioux once dug clam shells out of the river’s wetlands and carved them into buttons.

In 1985, Behrns, 53, and his son, John, 28, lifelong hunters, decided to build a museum on their property to display numerous hunting trophies, wildlife art and Les Behrns’ rare, complete collection of Winchester shotguns and rifles.

A Minnesota state game warden told Behrns he would need a federal permit, since he would be displaying, among other things, waterfowl. Behrns called the Minneapolis office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which sent two agents, John Decker and Kevin O’Brien.

The agents were noncommittal, Behrns recalled. They told him they wanted to meet with father and son together. John Behrns was about to return from a bear hunt in Canada.

Decker met with the two Behrnses at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport as John Behrns returned.

Smuggling Front Suspected

According to Les Behrns, Decker told them the agency had reason to believe the father and son wanted to build their museum as a front for running a wildlife-smuggling ring out of Canada.

“I nearly fell out of my chair,” Behrns said.

“They were trying to prove that some animals John had taken in Canada were illegal. They were greatly disturbed that John had a resident Canadian hunting license during the four years (1981-85) he worked up there.”

Behrns said agent Decker gave them three days to “confess.” The Fish and Wildlife Service then told Canadian federal wildlife officials they were bringing John Behrns up on charges of transporting illegally taken game animals out of Canada.

Canadian officials summoned Behrns to a hearing.

In March, 1986, John Behrns appeared in court in Edmonton, Canada, where all charges against him were dismissed.

“The Canadian fish and wildlife people said they had absolutely nothing on John, that they had no problem with him having a license because he was a legal Canadian resident at the time,” Les Behrns said. “The whole procedure took 15 minutes.”

Trophies Under Gunpoint

In one of two evidence seizures, six U.S. agents arrived one morning at the Behrns farm with a search warrant and loaded six game animal mounts into a truck. One agent stood at the entrance to the farm with a shotgun, stopping traffic.

“When I asked why the guy was in the road with the shotgun, Decker told me he had reason to believe I would attempt to ‘escape’ with the animals,” Behrns said.

As his trial date in Minneapolis grew close, Behrns says he received increasingly attractive plea-bargain offers from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis.

“About a week before the trial, they said they’d drop all charges if I pleaded guilty to illegal possession of one songbird,” he said. “But I wanted my day in court.”

In December, 1986, two days before Behrns was to go to trial, prosecutors dropped all charges.

Legal expenses for Behrns and his son came to $40,000.

“From what I know of the Behrns case,” says former Fish and Wildlife Service director Jantzen, “it never should have been brought. It was a case of trying to build a case after an arrest instead of before.”

Agency Defends Charges

But Larry Hood, law enforcement chief for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Twin Cities office, insists the charges were warranted. He said the agency had opposed dropping the Behrns case.

“The case was handled by a succession of U.S. attorneys, and the last one just did not want to prosecute,” he said. “Yes, we had evidence--our people intercepted John Behrns’ Canadian guide in Montana with a polar bear hide he said he was taking to Behrns.”

The Times repeatedly attempted to interview agent Decker, who was in charge of the Behrns case, but was told he was “not available.”

Peter Ekstrand, one of the Behrnses’ lawyers, said the hide was being brought to John Behrns as a gift by his Canadian roommate, who didn’t know he needed documents to carry it into the United States.

“The polar bear hide was never an important part of the case, it was pretty much dismissed in the pretrial period,” Ekstrand said. “The entire case can be attributed to sloppy work by U.S. attorneys.”

Many of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s controversial cases occur in Alaska, a mecca for big game hunters. The federal courthouse in Anchorage is frequently the scene of prosecutions under the Lacey Act.

(Agency cases are prosecuted by the Marine and Natural Resources section of the Lands Division of the Justice Department. Officials from those divisions declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Bavin, the agency’s law enforcement chief, says his agency handles more than 1,000 Lacey Act cases every year and has a “99% conviction rate.” But defense lawyers say that figure includes many defendants who pleaded guilty to lesser offenses to avoid the costs of a trial. “I’ve won nine out of 10 cases against them,” Anchorage attorney Dan Dennis said. “The (wildlife service) cases the U.S. Attorney’s Office brings into court here are regularly the weakest of any of the federal agencies. Part of their problem is that a lot of U.S. attorneys who wind up on USF & WS cases aren’t well-grounded in wildlife law.”

Another Anchorage lawyer, Sandra Seville, said “it doesn’t escape the notice of Alaskans the amount of money the federal government spends on some of these cases, or the way the federal government uses the Lacey Act as a hammer, to force out-of-state people to plea-bargain or pay huge fines in some cases.”

Dennis defended four Washington state moose hunters in a 1984 case he calls “typical.” It involved Dr. Charles Raab, an optometrist from Port Angeles, Wash., his two sons and a hunting companion, Ed Hall.

Each Kills Moose

On the morning of Aug. 13, 1984, each member of the Raab party, encamped in the Cloud Lake area on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, killed a legal moose within 3 miles of one another.

The front of a massive arctic storm moved into the area and, by the end of the day, the hunters would later testify, visibility was less than 3 feet.

Raab, his sons and Hall said that a freezing rain and high winds at first forced them to seek shelter behind the moose carcasses, then to abandon the animals and return to camp. At one point, they said, they became lost in the storm and had difficulty finding their way back.

They huddled in their tents two days, waiting out the storm. But when they returned to their moose, the meat had spoiled. They reported it to a state game warden in Kotzebue.

Arrested at Airport

As the four hunters were about to leave Alaska, in a bar at the Anchorage airport, their table was surrounded by state officers who arrested them and charged them with failure to retrieve game meat.

“They took our luggage off the plane. We were strip-searched, handcuffed, jailed overnight, and arraigned the next day,” Raab said.

It became a federal case months later, after the four hunters told Alaska state officials they would refuse to be tried in Kotzebue. There, they said, they would not receive a fair trial before an Eskimo jury.

In September, 1985, federal agents with search warrants simultaneously entered Raab’s home and the homes of his three companions in Washington state and seized antlers from the moose they had shot in Alaska--evidence they needed to make a Lacey Act charge of interstate transportation of illegally taken wildlife parts.

“At that point, each of us were looking at a total of $200,000 in fines, and three years in prison,” Raab said. “Then the feds told us that for $10,000 each they’d drop all charges.”

“I kept naively thinking that the Alaska fish and game people just didn’t have all the facts, that they didn’t understand the case,” Raab said of the time he and his party were facing only state charges.

“So I did something my attorney advised me not to do--I went to Anchorage and told the Alaska fish and game people exactly what kind of evidence we would present if we went to court, about how severe the storm was. I showed them how we could document this with weather charts and weather experts.”

When it became apparent the case was still going to court, Raab said, he “realized there was a maliciousness to the whole thing.”

At an August, 1986, trial in Anchorage, federal district Judge Andrew Kleinfeld dismissed Lacey Act charges after the prosecution presented its case. A conspiracy charge had been dismissed before the trial. The last remaining charge, a state count of failing to retrieve game meat, was dismissed, too.

The Raabs’ and Ed Hall’s legal bill: $40,000. Raab estimates the federal government spent $100,000 prosecuting the case.

Bavin, the Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement chief, oversees a staff of 212 special agents and administers a $20-million budget. He insists that all cases that go to the Justice Department for possible prosecution are carefully screened.

“Remember one thing: U.S. attorneys are very ambitious people who look very carefully at a case for its prosecutorial merit,” he said. “It’s their decision whether to prosecute. They ask a lot of questions of our people. They look for winners, believe me.”

Hunters Dispute Figures

Steve Boynton, an attorney who represents the year-old International Shooting and Hunting Alliance, a foundation formed as a result of hunter discontent, disagrees.

“Nonsense,” he said. “In court, you can beat 70% of all USF&WS; cases,” he said. “The only question is, do you want to pay for it?”

Boynton said the foundation is seeking congressional hearings and has considered establishing a legal defense fund. But “right now,” he said, “we’re looking at ways to get some controls on the USF & WS law enforcement division.”

For undercover operations that cost more than $30,000, Boynton said, the group would like to see a system by which the Fish and Wildlife Service would first have to get approval from an assistant interior secretary and the Interior Department’s solicitor general’s office. He said the foundation could also “document the need for the establishment of a congressional oversight committee.”

The foundation’s organizers also want evidence seized under search warrant authority promptly returned when charges against hunters are dropped or hunters win their cases in the courts.

Bruce Loeb, the Van Nuys hunter awakened by the 6 a.m. pounding on his front door, was charged with two Lacey Act counts in U.S. district court in Anchorage: interstate transporting of illegally taken game and same-day hunting-and-flying. He was also charged with conspiracy to commit the two violations.

Loeb, who owns a small security company, admits he could have saved himself considerable grief and money had he studied Alaska hunting laws before arriving at Alaska Rainbow Lodge, near King Salmon, in October, 1986.

He didn’t know, for example, that it is illegal in Alaska to fly and hunt grizzly bears within a single 24-hour period. The law was enacted decades ago to eliminate the practice of hunters spotting bears from airplanes, landing and shooting the animals, then returning the same day to their camp or lodge.

Loeb also didn’t know the operator of the hunting lodge he was visiting, Ron Hayes, had had his guide’s license taken away by the state and had encountered several previous problems with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

‘Hunter’ Was Agent

And he also didn’t know that one of the “hunters” he met upon arrival was actually U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service undercover agent Adam O’Hara, who introduced himself as George Abrams. O’Hara was building a case against Hayes, the lodge owner.

On Loeb’s second morning at the lodge, Hayes flew him and an assistant guide in a small plane to an area 40 miles away, where they saw a grizzly. Hayes landed, dropped off Loeb and the guide, then left.

Hours later, Loeb bagged a 500-to-600-pound grizzly, the same one he’d seen from the air. The animal was field dressed and in late afternoon, Hayes returned and flew the men back to the lodge.

O’Hara, the undercover agent who hunted with other lodge guests throughout his stay, observed that Loeb had flown and hunted grizzly on the same day. He observed other violations by other guests.

Throughout his stay, as well as on previous visits to the lodge, O’Hara hunted and killed big game animals to protect his cover.

After the raid on his home, Loeb was informed by the U.S. attorney’s office in Anchorage that he could face fines totaling $100,000 and five years in prison. He was offered a plea-bargain arrangement by which he would be fined $20,000 and all charges would be reduced to misdemeanors--providing he would testify against Hayes.

“I told my attorney I was going to fight it, that I was not going to pay a $20,000 fine for an inadvertent mistake,” Loeb said.

Early in his Anchorage trial last July, the government dropped its conspiracy charge. Loeb had pleaded not guilty.

The jury returned a guilty verdict. Judge H. Russell Holland sentenced Loeb to two $250 fines, two special assessments of $25 each and 40 hours of community service.

Immediately before passing sentence, however, in a conversation Loeb tape-recorded, Holland turned to the prosecutors and said:

“There’s something about this case that bothers me. In my mind, the key element here is that Mr. Hayes and his associates were quite plainly operating a commercial hunting operation that was illegal.

“If I was convinced Mr. Loeb was a part of that conspiracy, I would not hesitate to fine him $20,000, but we don’t have that kind of situation here.

“I don’t understand why this case wasn’t taken care of (earlier) . . . I’m really put off by what has taken place here. The kind of offense we’re talking about . . . he has been convicted of an offense no more serious than speeding.

“To me, it’s shocking the government (would) ask for a $20,000 fine (in a case) that, if brought against a state resident here, would result in a $500 fine.”