NOAA agents' visit draws fire

Two federal fishery law enforcement agents visited Monte Rome last week at his Intershell speciality seafood distributorship, as Rome prepared to testify as a witness for the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction at the trial scheduled to begin five days later.

And the action is drawing questions and fire from state Attorney General Martha Coakley, U.S. Sen. John Kerry and others.

One of the agents — the one who showed a business card — was James M. MacDonald. The card said "special agent." MacDonald worked out of Portland, Maine, for the Office of Law Enforcement, National Marine Fisheries Service.

Rome was preparing to testify under oath about a conversation he had a number of years ago with Charles E. Juliand, who heads the Office of General Counsel in Gloucester. And Rome said the agents wanted to know what he intended to say in his testimony — specifically about his 4-year-old conversation with Juliand.

Rome said the agents appealed to his "spirit of cooperation."

Rome said he was furious, and said, "How dare you come in here and ask me to speak to a federal agent."

He said he believed the agents were armed. But MacDonald and his partner departed soon thereafter, without Rome's cooperation.

The flashpoint conversation between Rome and Juliand occurred sometime after Juliand in early 2006 had lost a trial in which he attempted to shut down the auction for accepting for sale too much cod. Because the auction dared go to trial and actually won, the case took on a certain legendary status along the waterfront.

It was known as the "one cod case" for the minimal overage that was alleged — and could not be proved, at that.

Juliand appealed the judge's brooming of his case to the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who reversed the trial judge. The case remained active on appeal until Tuesday when the auction settled all its legal problems without admitting violations.

Back then, Juliand — according to Rome — used vile language to describe Larry Ciulla, president of the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction.

Last week, Rome was prepared to testify in the latest case against the auction that Juliand — with whom he was having a discussion of federal regulations of fish parts — described Ciulla as a "lying piece of scumbag (expletive)."

Rome told the Times that MacDonald and his partner told him, "We understand you said Chuck Juliand said these things about Larry."

Recounted at the impending trial, Juliand's pique at Ciulla back then loomed as a key piece in a defense that included the assertion that NMFS — and Juliand specifically — had a vendetta against the auction.

Many fishermen have also told the Times and the Inspector General that NOAA's NMFS investigators promised to drop charges for "ratting out" the auction.

Juliand and MacDonald did not return phone calls yesterday.

But Stephen Ouellette, a leading fishing industry lawyer who has represented the auction in the past, said that — while contacting a potential witness is not per se unethical — any effort to coerce a witness to change or repress planned testimony could be considered a serious violation of the ethics of the Massachusetts Bar.

Coakley and Kerry were informed of the effort by NOAA agents to gain knowledge from Rome what he might say at the trial. According to state Rep. Ann-Margaret Ferrante, an attorney who previously represented the auction and remains close to the Ciullas, both placed angry calls to NOAA chief administrator Jane Lubchenco's office protesting the conduct.

The auction had become a rallying cause cÃ©lÃ®bre that earned the support of the Massachusetts legislative leadership and the congressional leadership, which last June convinced Lubchenco to call in the federal Commerce Department's Office of Inspector General to look nationally at prosecutorial misconduct allegations.

The auction's owners, the Ciulla family, had much been battling efforts by the Offices of Law Enforcement and General Counsel to pin a serious violation on the business almost since it opened in 1999.

The last of three cases, brought out a year ago by Deirdre Casey of the counsel's office, was the most serious, entailing a possible closing for 120 days and a $335,200 penalty for 59 counts of brokering illegally landed fish mostly from the local day boats that haul cod and yellowtail from Middle Bank or other inshore grounds.

The auction and government settled this case on Tuesday, the day the trial was set to begin in a Boston courtroom. The Ciullas admitted no violations and emerged with a clean legal record, but agreed to pay a $85,000 fine over three years and close 35 days not in succession, but at the choice of the business.

Rome's decision to testify at the trial was obviated by the settlement.

But he told the Times yesterday that, what seemed to set off Juliand back in 2006 was Rome's casual observation about "all this prosecution for one cod fish."

About the time Juliand took an appeal to the top of NOAA in 2006, he also initiated a new series of investigations into the operation of the auction, the leading platform for the sale of fish from the Gulf of Maine.

That included a forced entry into the auction complex on Harbor Loop in the fall of 2006, documented by a Gloucester Police report, and a raid by armed officers weeks later to search for evidence of illegal fish brokering — a second set of books, hidden fish and the like.

They found nothing like that, but eventually assembled a 59-count case built by the automatic reports from the auction of the transactions with fishing boats. Many involved technical violations by the boats' failure to have a letter from NOAA indicating where they were allowed to fish for yellowtail.

Inspector General Todd Zinser's-28 page preliminary report in January delineated what was described as a troubling pattern by NOAA law enforcement agents in trampling the rights of fishermen.

NOAA law enforcement director Dale Jones has become the center of an expanding investigation into alleged misconduct and toleration of improper behavior.

Kerry, Congressmen Barney Frank, John Tierney and William Delahunt from Massachusetts and Walter Jones and Mike McIntyre of North Carolina have all called for Jones to step down following two days of revelations in different House oversight subcommittees.

The first subcommittee, chaired by Congressman Dennis Kucinich with Tierney hosting in Gloucester, revealed that Dale Jones had used proceeds from an Asset Forfeiture Fund for personal foreign travel.

The next day, the second subcommittee, chaired by Madeline Z. Bordallo, produced testimony from IG Zinser that Jones authorized the shredding of more than 100 files of documents last November.

Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3464, or rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.

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