Federal investigators who seized a truckload of documents from the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction in December with a search warrant have not filed any charges seven months after the raid.
Agents from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, armed with an administrative search warrant, raided the auction Dec. 7, removing 150 boxes of documents "relating to the catch, take, harvest, landing, receipt, purchase and processing of fish" by the auction between Jan. 1, 2004, and December 2006.
Andrew Cohen, the special agent in charge, would only say at the time that the ongoing investigation is related to the federal Magnuson-Stevens conservation act pertaining to seafood and commerce.
"There are thousands of documents we're going through," said Mark Oswell, a spokesman for the division of enforcement in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which took the documents last year. "Our agents are putting together their case packets and going through the documents to see what kind of violations may have occurred. They'll take that and hand it over to the attorneys."
Kevin Kiely, an attorney who represents Harbor Loop-based Gloucester Fish Exchange Inc. and its owner, Lawrence Ciulla, said the seizure was unwarranted and that the lack of charges seven months later shows NOAA was casting a wide net in hopes of turning up illegal or inappropriate activity.
"The reason I see they haven't done anything is because there isn't anything there," Kiely said.
Oswell disputed that the enforcement division has the capacity to go on fishing expeditions.
"To be quite frank, agents do not have the time or resources to find a fish house on the seaboard and just see what their documents say," he said.
It took officials more than eight hours, and the documents filled one U-Haul truck. No charges or other allegations have come forth, leading the auction's attorneys and supporters to believe NOAA was acting purely on suspicion because of the broad scope of documents it seized.
Any warrant must have an affidavit from the government agency seeking it stating its reasons for the search. That affidavit was sealed by the federal magistrate judge, who issued it Dec. 6 in U.S. District Court in Boston. Kiely said NOAA asked that the warrant remain sealed after they took the documents and that the Ciullas declined to start the lengthy and expensive process of trying to have a judge unseal it.
The warrant was not criminal in nature. Rather, it was an administrative warrant, meaning it has to do with regulations - in this case those in the federal fishery law Magnuson-Stevens - rather than criminal offenses.
Kenneth Ryan, a Gloucester police detective, was sent to the display auction from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Dec. 7, according to the police log, to monitor the search. His report said "20-plus" agents took about 150 boxes of documents during that time period. The agents represented the Northeast division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement. The Massachusetts Environmental Police also participated in the search.
The auction, opened in 1997 by a family that once owned and operated a fish processing plant on the Gloucester waterfront, provides buyers and sellers an open marketplace to sell the city's daily catches, such as cod, haddock and swordfish.
Instead of brokers serving as middlemen between boats and buyers, the auction, such as others in New Bedford, Portland, Maine, and Europe, combines the two in the open. The auction can handle up to six boats at one time in its 40,000-square-foot complex.
