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Bill Sheldon buying eels in Brewer, Maine
Photograph by Jenny Calivas
High Street in Ellsworth, a busy four-lane road lined with a Denny's, a McDonald's, an L.L. Bean outlet, and a Sun360 tanning salon, leads to Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park. Beyond the strip malls and lobster pounds, further down east, are scarlet-hued blueberry barrens and miles of unbroken fog. Drive from southern Maine in the summer and you're bound to sit in Ellsworth traffic. Guidebooks claim the regional identity of the city has been stripped away, but at 3 a.m. the morning I arrived, a sign flashed outside the pet store in the cold night air: Cleaner Net & Air Pump For ELVER.
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Peter Andrey Smith / BuzzFeed
Behind Jasper's Motel and Restaurant, a yellow extension cord snaked through the window of Room 27 and connected to a 110-volt bubbler pumping oxygen into a tank of elvers on the back of a Ford Super Duty, or, as its license plate says, EEL WAGN. This is Bill Sheldon's truck. He's an affable, clean-shaven guy, aged 67, with glasses and an LED light clipped to the brim of his hat. In 2012, he paid his fishermen $12 million for elvers (about a third of the estimated $40 million paid out in Maine over the season) and, for a couple weeks this spring, the elver kingpin holed up at Jasper's Motel with a half million dollars in cash. The best runs and the best money too, he said, arrived on dark, moonless, rainy nights.
The elvers flew out of Logan or JFK international airpors to China and Taiwan in clear plastic bags filled with oxygenated water to feed the fastest-growing animal-feeding operations on the planet: Asian aquaculture. The baby eels, two inches long with glassine bodies, nearly invisible sperm-shaped fauna with a thin black vertebrae and a pair of magnificent black eyes, swim inland on the final stretch of a five-month, several-thousand-mile-long quest to find a freshwater home.
Eel farmers need babies caught in the wild since no one's reliably bred the species in captivity. They are reared in ponds like seedlings: Plant a farm with elvers and, in six months, a pound of elvers might yield 1,200 pounds of meat that then might, at $10 a pound, fetch $120,000. Seventy percent of eels, unagi, was sold in Japan, according to one estimate by the newspaper The Yomiuri Shimbun. James Prosek's seminal book on the subject, Eels, reports that some 40% of eel eaten in a Manhattan sushi joint probably flew from Maine to Asia and back again. Scarcity drove the prices up and, stream-side, a pound of elvers sold for around $2,000. Rumor had it some fishermen were clearing nearly $100,000 a night.
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Peter Andrey Smith / BuzzFeed
One foggy Saturday in mid-April, with a light drizzle on the windshield at daybreak, I sat with Sheldon in the Eel Wagon. He was in a parking lot near the Union River, its banks all lit up with LEDs and Coleman lanterns, the fishermen said, like the Vegas Strip. Sheldon seemed preoccupied. He clicked a Carhartt pen. Under his armrest, in bank bundles of ten grand and five grand, he kept piles of money. (He said he paid the owners of the parking lot, a local construction company, a onetime fee of $5,000 to keep a rival dealer off his turf — apparently a Korean guy in a white-paneled van, whom I never saw — though another dealer told me, "Ellsworth is lousy with Koreans.")
Recently the local paper, the Bangor Daily News, reported that MS-13, the El Salvadorian drug gang, was after dealers' cash. A pillhead had also followed Sheldon down to the river one night. "If I was sitting in New York City, selling roses or whatever, chances are I'd get robbed," he told me. "The fact that I can run around with all this money just speaks well for Down East Maine people. Certainly some bad apples. But to be able to operate like this, I don't know what it means, except what I just told you." Elver fishermen returned with wads of hundreds when Sheldon overpaid, which happened quite often, probably, I'd guess, on account of taking prescription medical marijuana. Nonetheless, he wasn't taking any chances. A flare gun dangled from the grab handle of his truck ("So I can shoot him in the guts," he said, pointing the thing out the driver's side window), and he displayed a black Glock .40 on the dash.
Everywhere the elver dealer went so did Larry Taylor, a stocky, 48-year-old guy in jeans and a sweatshirt. Taylor had a concealed .45, a 9 mm in his belt, and a 12-gauge pistol-grip pump. A friend told him Sheldon was looking for someone with a concealed carry permit, and Taylor, a contractor, was laid off, he said, "because of mud." (Mud season, in other words, makes outdoor work all but impossible.) All morning, the two dumped buckets of eels into a fine-mesh net. Before daybreak, a young woman in rubber boots and a big sweatshirt pulled up to the parking lot. Small talk.
"How's little Alyssa?"
"A little better."
Sheldon weighed a squirming mass, a softball's worth of elvers, in a metal mixing bowl. "Thirty-six hundred dollars," he said. "You'll get even more tomorrow night."
"I will? That's good."
A while later, another fisherman rolled in with less than a fifth of a pound. Sheldon hopped behind the wheel of the Eel Wagon. "Nobody else caught nothing," he said, punching numbers on the oversize buttons of his calculator. "Six eighty-four," he said, and counted out $700. "Have breakfast on me."
Around daybreak, Taylor drove over to Dunkin' Donuts, and then the two went back to Jasper's Motel, where they continued dealing in the back lot.
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Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed
In 1970, a fisheries attaché in Tokyo sent a memo asking if the state of Maine had enough elvers to warrant a commercial fishery. The task fell to Sheldon, a state employee with a newly minted degree in wildlife management from the University of Maine at Orono. His boss told him, "Bill, go out and find out if we got any."
Over the next two springs, 1971 and 1972, Sheldon found transparent elvers — "glass eels," as he called them (he and many others use the terms interchangeably) — swimming up every stream he visited: the Kennebec, the Penobscot, the Pleasant, and the St. Croix. The transparent fish shimmied over waterfalls, rocks, fishways, and straight up the face of hydroelectric dams. His report, "Elvers in Maine: Techniques of Locating, Catching and Holding," describes the basic life cycle: In November, orphaned at birth in the mysterious depths of the Sargasso Sea at the heart of the Bermuda Triangle, eels begin their elusive migration as transparent ribbons "shaped like willow leaves." Known as leptocephali, literally "slim-headed creatures," they float up the East Coast on the North Atlantic Drift and — with no homing instinct — they're blown inland. They wriggle toward the smell of freshwater in Florida, up the East Coast all the way to Maine and Greenland, or to the coastal waters of Haiti and Venezuela if the currents carry the larvae southward. In freshwater, translucent glass eels develop into pigmented, serpentine elvers.
Eels live for up to 20 years, and the American species, Anguilla rostrata, once inhabited nearly every body of freshwater east of the Mississippi. Sheldon didn't say then — and no one can really say to this day — why eel migration is the reverse of most other fish and why at the end of their life the entire population heads back to their birthplace in the Sargasso Sea where they have one last orgiastic night before dying. "Wherever eels spawn," he wrote, "it seems likely that the entire North American population could be sustained by the spawning of adults from only a few of the freshwater population."
A mature female pumped out as many as 22 million larvae, and where brackish tidewater met freshwater, Sheldon began catching them in a homemade Sheldon's elver trap, a shoebox-sized cage cobbled together with wood and a window screen with a garden hose for a carrying handle. He sent one batch to Japan just to see if they made it alive. They made it, but Japanese buyers preferred the Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica. A pound of American eels were worth $30, so Sheldon went into the lobster business. By the late 1970s, a Washington Post headline read, "Japan Interested in Maine Trash Fish." ("For a while," the Post story said, an eel fisherman "was getting $300 per pound… But the bottom fell out after only a few months." One guy kept elvers in a wooden water tower in an attempt to stockpile but he too was left with nothing when the market crashed.) Former North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms accused Japan of manipulating prices in 1978; a buyer in San Francisco told the Wall Street Journal that Americans simply didn't know how to handle their eels.
Sheldon began chasing the elver runs, traveling to Florida in January and fishing right up the East Coast. It was legal in all the coastal states. Elvers reached New Jersey in February, and when they hit Maine in March and April, he came home. In 1995, a shortage of Japanese eels sent prices from $55 a pound to $300, and anyone with a mesh net began staking out claims. Police reports began filtering in that year: Fishermen pushed each other into streams, fistfights broke out, and gas tanks, some said, were being filled with bleach. Property owners lobbied to keep the working-class trespassers off their waterfronts. Those selling adult eels for bait wanted to put a stop to catching the baby elvers. Sheldon argued the high natural mortality rate meant any elvers he caught might be eaten by predators anyway. By the late 1990s, Florida, Connecticut, and New Jersey banned elver fishing. One 1999 Bangor Daily News editorial said fishermen could not be blamed for an apparent decline in eel populations; these laws were motivated more by snobbery than biology.
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Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed
Biologists have never witnessed an eel's entire life cycle and never counted every elver invading all the world's rivers and streams, but, by many estimates, the range of American eels has contracted over the last century. Few, if any, eels survived the journey down the St. Lawrence River and into Lake Ontario, and the population fell to as little as 1% the historic level. Along the banks of the Kennebec River in central Maine, a fisherman named Doug Watts found piles of rotten eels below a hydroelectric dam. An eel passed through a turbine looked like bloodied fingers stuck through a whirring window fan.
In 1997, Watts petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to have the species listed as endangered. Nothing really happened. In 2011, Craig Manson, a former Bush administration official and the head of a nonprofit in California called the Council for Endangered Species Act Reliability, or CESAR, sued the feds. Some fishermen suspected Manson was part of a right-wing conspiracy to disrupt the Endangered Species Act. What better way to get the attention of East Coast politicians than by listing the eel as endangered and forcing federal agencies to remove some 25,000 dams to accommodate them, sabotaging the Act's reputation to force the issue of reform? When I put these allegations to Manson, he said, "My mother would be shocked to hear that." The legal petition he filed, if anything, appeared to exhibit a genuine concern for the species even if it was, as Watts said, some sort of "nine-dimensional chess." Either way, Watts said with all the cash being waved around, the overseas demand guaranteed a state-sanctioned extinction of some of the last eels left on earth. "We're giving our birthright to a bunch of people from Asia. 'Here, have 'em! Drive 'em to extinction!' In 20 years, the truck I bought with that eel money, the oilcan's going to break on a dirt road and I'm going to be divorced and that's it! There's your species! This is the economics of planned, deliberate extinction."
Scientists from the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources consider the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) endangered and met in July to discuss the imperiled status of the Japanese eel. Meanwhile, American eels went from $300 a pound to $3,000, creating a black market halfway around the world. If the nighttime standoffs and the poachers caught in New Hampshire and Rhode Island this year were any indication, the promise of striking it rich — with or without a state-sanctioned license — proved irresistible all along the Atlantic coast. In early February, three men were caught with 24,250 elvers in New Jersey. (One of them, Robert Royce, was once allegedly involved in a scheme to import 25 tons of marijuana from Haiti. He'd since changed his last name but not, it seemed, his ways.) Marine patrol officers caught another New Hampshire man in Maine with over 100,000 illegal elvers. Selling a pound of illegal elvers would probably cover the fine.
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One morning, after Sheldon smoked his prescription meds and began writing out receipts, I asked if he ate at the sushi place across from his motel, which sold roasted unagi (freshwater) and anago (saltwater) for $5.50 and a signature roll with eel for $12.50. Eel tasted like spaghetti, as far as he knew, but the Asian chefs were after the texture. They filleted and grilled the oily flesh over an open flame, or steamed and smothered the meat in soy sauce. Every year, Japan celebrated Doyo Ushi No Hi, a traditional eel-eating day in late July when restaurants served unagi as a source of stamina during the sweltering summer heat.
"I had smoked eel one time," Sheldon said, "and I tasted it for two days." All of a sudden, he opened his door and rolled out of the Eel Wagon, leaving its door ajar, money locked under the armrest. Seconds later, he returned with a single elver, a translucent wriggling worm of a fish, its thread-like black spine visible through the skin. The elver tickled his palm. He tilted his head back, opened his mouth, and dropped it in. Eyes closed, Sheldon gripped the skin around his Adam's apple. Then, he swallowed and waited. "Right around here," he said, "he starts swimming back up."
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Kevin Shi
Peter Andrey Smith / BuzzFeed
The taste for eel drove hundreds of buyers to Maine. A dealer from the Eel Depot in Flushing, Queens, Kevin Shi, 42, with spiky hair, glasses, and a can of Coke in his hand, first claimed to speak no English and then told me in rapid-fire clip, "I buy for Chinamen." In his rented Maine warehouse, he kept a shotgun propped up behind the rice cooker. Other dealers said the 2011 tsunami had wiped aquaculture ponds and sent the price skyrocketing. Sheldon claimed he had been in the midst of an international bidding war. Korean buyers called him. He mimicked his conversation.
"I don't have any for you. I'm selling to China."
"Well, we pay you the same."
"Nope."
"Well, we pay you more."
Sheldon then called his buyers — Chinese guys who wired him $600,000 on handshake deals — and said, "These guys want to pay me more for the eels. It's pretty hard to turn down a bigger offer."
"We'll match the price. Fuck the Koreans."
That, in so many words, Sheldon said, was the reason so many dealers and fishermen and poachers were running around. There was simply too much at stake.
Six hours into the day and not yet 9 a.m., his cell phone went off, a duck call: quack, quack, quack. "Go ahead," Sheldon said.
"Sorry to bother you. It's Solomon. You down by the river or up at the hotel?"
"At the hotel. Take your time."
A stream of water spilled into the parking lot at Jasper's Motel and a line of fishermen formed — lobstermen in hip waders, young guys in Adidas track pants, a woman in a neon Harley sweatshirt. All carried five-gallon buckets outfitted with battery-operated aquarium pumps. The pumps had names like Hush Bubbles and sold for $15 down at the pet store. Fishermen dumped buckets of water through a fine-mesh net. Sheldon weighed out the elvers and counted out hundred-dollar bills. Around 9 o'clock, a woman with brown hair who looked about 40 walked toward Room 27.
"I don't need toilet paper," Sheldon said, shouting. "I don't need towels." (The housekeeper took him seriously and delivered neither towels nor toilet paper to Room 27.)
One of the guys standing at the Eel Wagon said, "He don't bathe."
Sheldon lowered his voice. "I don't," he said. "I'm in the water every day."
When he returned from his nets on the Union River, everyone else stood back. Four pounds and later six pounds. (For those keeping score at home: That's one night, a bad night, mind you, and he'd have paid out nearly 20 grand for those elvers.) One fisherman said, "The man can fucking fish." Sheldon said it was simply a matter of knowing when to set out your nets.
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