Gator trade: U.S. agents penetrate the netherworld of illegal animal poaching

Meet Charles Strickland -- alligator poacher, reptile tanner and all-purpose journeyman hoodlum.

Also known as Dave Hayes, a small-time New Orleans gangster with an apartment in the French Quarter and an oil-leasing business that launders a lucrative sideline in illegal furs, ivory, scrimshaw, marijuana and cocaine.

He's also Big Jim Pridgen, a Mississippi good old boy who runs a catering business specializing in illegal wild game -- ducks, geese, redfish, deer, your choice -- out of a knotty-pine restaurant and no-tell motel in the red-light row south of Jackson, Miss. Big Jim has no permanent address or even a telephone because he's on the lam from a fang-toothed wife and has a gaggle of detectives and lawyers chasing him through four southern states.

And then, some of the time, he is Dave Hall, an absent father and husband who has spent the better part of the past 26 years on the road -- in Acadian Louisiana, backwater Carolina, Alaska, Tennessee, Mexico, Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, California -- as an agent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

A game warden.

Ever since the mid-'60s Hall has inhabited a netherworld of booze, speed, tobacco haze and spectral crime. He has hidden in bayous and on a Brooklyn wharf, at 2 or 3 in the morning, with two concealed firearms on his person and a military-issue night scope. He has infiltrated, undercover, alone, gangs of good old boy outlaws in the rural South who had the sheriffs and D.A.s working for them.

He was the first nonmember ever invited inside the secret chalet of the Brothers, the Alaskan branch of the Hell's Angeles, who keep the skulls of their murdered enemies on display (and he certainly would have qualified as one of them). He once walked in the front door of a New York gangster's home after the gangster -- who had two armed Mexicans prominently on display -- had told him he had detection equipment as good as you'd find at the White House, and if he was bugged he would be killed. He was bugged.

Hall was subsequently cited by a top federal prosecutor in New York for performing "some of the most brilliant undercover detective work I have ever seen." Hall had materminded one of the most sensational stings in Fish and Wildlife history, in a case involving millions of dollars' worth of illegal ivory.

It wasn't the first time Hall had entered New York's underworld. In another case he had sent two undercover agents on a chase involving illegal drugs, counterfeit money, stolen property and a string of unsavory characters under the direction of Jack Kelly, a leading New York dealer in illegal alligator hides.

Few people think of game wardens as having glamorous jobs. And Hall isn't exactly a glamorous character: His desk looks as if it had snowed documents nonstop for several months, and were it not for the crocodile skull, you'd guess his office belonged to some manic Labor Department statistician who finally went off the deep end. When he isn't fidgeting with the expensive gadgetry he drags all over the place -- video cameras, tape recorders, electronic goose callers -- he is talking a blue streak or lapsing into spells of brooding thought.

But Hall, a former Mississippi bar fighter turned wildlife biologist and fierce conservationist, has done more to help ensure the survival of America's threatened fish and wildlife than most people can imagine. He has done this by infiltrating the black market and passing himself off as another fool with a big wallet and an unslakable thirst for illicit goods. Hidden tape recorders take down everything. Weeks or months of field work culminate in a sudden bust. A lot of people go to jail and, temporarily at least, Hall has saved the lives of animals like the walrus, whose ivory tusks have made it one of the most hunted animals on Earth.

But it was the alligator that brought Hall to the mob-controlled wharves of New York, at a time when the ornery, prehistoric reptile was the victim of habitat loss and old-fashioned greed. When Hall closed in on him, Jack Kelly alone was exporting thousands of hides a year, many bound for Japan, a prime importer of luxury consumer goods.

In Dave Hall's pantheon of criminals, there are bad dudes, bad-ass dudes, outlaws, raggedy-ass outlaws, gangsters, no-goods, scumbags, lowlifes, dirtbags, dirtballs, hoodlums and bikers. Jack Kelly was any of these at once, but more often he was a plain, ordinary lowlife. A lowlife is just a rung above a biker in Dave Hall's estimation. "Kelly," he says, "he was the sort of lowlife who'd swagger down the street with a .38 and just as soon blow you away as look at you."

Instrumental in the trapping of Jack Kelly was a former poacher and Louisiana outlaw whom Hall persuaded to go straight -- A.J. Caro. Hall arranged for me to meet Caro at a Holiday Inn in Jennings, La., in March 1985 -- two years before Caro disappeared. "You told me you wanted to meet some Cajun outlaws," Hall said at the time. "I'm gonna introduce you to a legend. One of the toughest bastards I ever ran into. The state game wardens chased him right into a swamp once and he hid out for about six months. Dove right out of his truck. He hid under some floating marsh mats for about two days while they turned that place upside down."

"Old A.J.'s killed as many alligators illegally," he added, "as you've drunk cups of coffee."

When I met Caro he was wearing new Levi's, a checkered flannel shirt and a brown cotton jacket. Perhaps 35 or 40, with a walnut-oil complexion and thick, curly black hair, he was handsome, with an air of quiet dignity in repose, but there was something sinister underneath. The body was formed to match -- five feet eight, close to 200 pounds, a small running back with explosive speed.

The three of us drove from Jennings to Lake Arthur, once the duck-market-hunting capital of the world. That's a distinction which at various times in our natural history was also claimed by Newark, N.J. (in the 1700s, when Manhattan markets were hung with wild ducks); Chincoteague, Va. (in the 1800s); Colusa and Petaluma, Calif. (one market hunter killed 6,200 canvasbacks near Petaluma in a single year, 1892); Greenville, Miss.; Belle Glade, Fla. In the market-hunting era these places had one thing in common: a proximity to enormous reaches of wetlands, which brought in square miles of migratory ducks and geese, herons and egrets, teal and coots.

Louisiana has long been reputed to contain more lawless hunters and fishermen, per capita, than any of the other United States. There are several reasons. Southern Louisiana is the last place in America, outside of Alaska, where significant numbers of people still earn some of their livelihood or gain much of their sustenance from the land. They do it because their ancestors did it; because a lot of them are Cajun, and with Cajuns it is a matter of pride and tradition; because many have too little education to do anything else; and because the region's major employer -- the oil and gas industry -- hires and fires in rhythm with the world price of oil. But mainly they do it because Louisiana remains one of the few places on Earth where you can.

It is, or was, the best habitat for wildlife in the entire world. By the late 19th century, the smorgasbord of fish and fur and fowl began to disappear from the state. Most of the bears were hunted out. The bison were already gone. Canals were sliced through impentrable marshes, fires flamed off a lot of surface cover in drought years and the market massacre of waterfowl began, continuing for some decades until it was stopped -- until it was declared illegal, in any case -- at the close of the First World War.

Southern Louisiana resisted the most indefatigable efforts to reclaim it. Cajuns were wedded to the wilderness, to the swampy forests and bayous and lakes to which they had been banished. And now -- we are in the 1950s and '60s -- their own breezy excesses had stolen its plenitude away. During his first couple of years in New Orleans, Dave Hall would run all-day-and-all-night game patrols in the marshes that were like search-and-engagement missions in Vietnam. His fight was not with the poachers but with a culture. These were descendants of people who had inherited no decent land for industry or farms; they lived in places unreachable by road; their children had at most a year or two of schooling; they felt they had no choice but to live off the land. That it had become illegal was of no concern at all. One just had to avoid being caught.

"This is how these people lived," Hall says. "There was practically no cash economy here in the 19th century.... Then when the cities were growing in the South and there was a demand for products of the land, a lot of these people became market hunters. They went from subsistence living to making pretty good cash income from ducks and furs and alligator skins. Now, I've seen this happen with the Eskimos: When you introduce a subsistence people to a cash economy, it's like giving them drugs. They just beat the hell out of their wild resources and don't really realize or even care whether it's going to last."

By the 1940s all they had left in abundance, and all that was still legal to trap and hunt, were crawfish, the small mammals they call varmints -- and alligators.

For a creature that can grow to 14 feet, that has a special gustatory fondness for pigs and dogs, that bellows and snorts clouds of vapor and is armored with bone-snapping teeth, alligators managed to slip under the crushing wave of civilization for a long time. They were killed out quickly at the fringes of the range, but in their territorial heartland they hung on in great numbers until after the First World War, when the fashion industry decided their skins were chic.

Species that had disappeared earlier -- Carolina parakeets, bison, wolves, bears -- were done in because they got in the way of settlement. Others -- passenger pigeons are the famous example -- were slaughtered for sport, so-called, and food. The alligator was a peculiar lesson in how vanity and urban wealth can ruin the wild. Between 1938 and 1958, when alligator pocketbooks and the like became popular novelties, Louisiana lost 90 percent of its alligators.

States began passing laws to protect the alligator, and in 1973 alligators also fell under the protection of the federal Endangered Species Act. One result was a sudden, enormous increase in the "harvest" overseas, followed by a sudden, awe-inspring population collapse. In 1950 alone nearly five million caiman hides went through the port of Manaus, Brazil. By the 1960s, caiman shipments through Manaus had declined 98 percent. This was, of course, predictable. But it was also predictable that with protection a creature as opportunistic and adaptable as the American alligator would rebound fairly soon. It didn't.

Some blamed the creature's continuing slide toward extinction on habitat loss. But others blamed market hunting. It was a troublesome theory, for what it really implied was a mass breakdown in law enforcement at fish and game department throughout the South. This was the point of view that propelled Dave Hall to Louisiana in 1969.

"When I got to Louisiana," he says, "the price of alligator skins was higher than ever. It was like the good old days of market hunting had started over again. There was so much money in it that they had the game wardens and sheriffs fixed.... It was like drugs are today." One dealer who was busted in 1971 had singlehandedly exported 127,000 American alligator skins over the previous three years -- or half the estimated population.

Some 20,000 people were poaching alligators around this time, Caro told me. "I doan mean they were doin it for a living like some of us were makin most of our money from alligators," he said. "We were professionals. I mean you had that many people in the parishes between New Orleans and Texas who were gettin table meat and makin some income off the land, and if they saw a cocodrie, they was gonna pop it."

I asked, "How did they know how to sell the skins?"

"Everybody knew," said A.J. "You had middlemen selling to middlemen. There was Wildlife and Fisheries people who'd sell them to you and buy them from you."

Caro got out of the poaching business some years later, after he'd served a jail sentence and developed a career as a part-time bouncer. But he hadn't gotten out of the business altogether. By the 1970s, instead of killing alligators, he was buying hides by the thousands from others and driving them to New York.

His boss was Jack Kelly, who was advancing him hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy hides from local hunters, then paying for each trip north. On one of his last trips, to help him over his freeway blues, Caro took his girlfriend with him. She was a Cajun girl, small, pretty and blackhaired. He should have noticed that Kelly was ogling her the moment they walked in his door. The hides Caro brought were fresh, not even salted, and Kelly said he could earn a couple hundred more dollars by taking them to his warehouse and salting them down. His girlfriend remained behind, at Kelly's invitation; she could go shopping with his wife.

There was no wife, at least not that day. Caro never told Dave Hall exactly what had happened to his girlfriend. Apparently she wasn't sure herself; Caro was convinced she had been drugged. All Dave Hall would tell me is that Caro was sure something "bad, bad, bad" had happened to her, and he was enraged -- so enraged that he put in a call to Hall, who had visited him after his earlier bust and invited him to help the Fish and Wildlife Service.

"I want to get him for you," he said, suggesting he might kill Kelly in revenge.

"A.J., I can't let you go up there if you're maybe gonna kill Kelly," Hall said. "I'll tell you what, though. I might let you do it if you go up there with one of my agents."

"I can't go up to Jack Kelly's with no undercover game warden. He could get us both killed. Kelly smells cops like a hound smells deer."

"It ain't a he I have in mind. It's a she."

There were, at the time, only three or four female undercover game wardens in the country. Because of the affirmative action laws, more and more women were applying for the job. But if they were figuring that it would be easier than being a street cop, they were in for a rude shock. If a woman tried to collar a gang of poachers, even in the company of a male warden, all hell broke loose. Deer season! Duck season! Have a woman tell you you were under arrest ... for an overlimit of ducks? In 1984 one female game warden was shot to death. Many of the women who went to work for Fish and Wildlife didn't last two years, even if they did no undercover work.

There were, however, a couple who had worked out exceptionally well. One who showed considerable promise had been on the job less than a year and had never handled a case remotely like this. She was 26, smart and tough as a wolverine.

Dave Hall asked Marie Palladini to fly down to New Orleans to see if she could stand working with Caro. He introduced them at a French Quarter cafe and left. Marie called later that night. She could not only work with A.J., she even liked him a little bit. She spent most of the next day with him to be sure and also to reinvent 26 years of her life. Shortly thereafter they left in Caro's van for Patuxent, Md. All Marie remembers about the drive is that she endured 15 straight hours of instruction in how to talk like a Cajun. "Talking Pittsburgh ain't gonna cut it with Kelly," Caro had said.

Patuxent is the home of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service research center; it contains, in addition to captive breeders and endangered species, a huge trove of confiscated wild animal parts. Caro took one brief look at the pile of alligator skins that had been requisitioned for him and waved them away. They had been frozen; there were telltale marks of freezer burn.

Kelly was selling mainly to Japan, and the Japanese hide dealers were fanatics about quality.

When Caro realized he wasn't getting anywhere with the biologists at Patuxent, he called Dave Hall in New Orleans. Hall called his chief, who said he didn't have any fresh skins. And if Caro went back to Louisiana and killed some alligators, that would be highly illegal.

The chief had mentioned killing alligators; he hadn't said anything about taking them on consignment from dealers who already had them in possession.

Caro flew back to New Orleans, and three days later his pickup truck contained about 300 alligator hides under a tarp. Dave Hall winced. Why did he have to buy so god-damned many? Caro said Kelly knew exactly how many were available, and if he brought fewer, Kelly would be suspicious. Dave Hall helped A.J. salt down the hides and stuff them in fiber barrels. He wasn't precisely sure if what he was doing was legal or not. They shipped them back to Maryland by air freight, without a hitch.

When Marie found out she would be accompanying a notorious poacher to the house of a notorious thug on an undercover sting -- without her badge or her gun -- she almost wanted to quit the job on the spot. But Dave Hall promised that there would be an agent on a bicycle pedaling around the house, another on a motorcycle no more than a few minutes away and a helicopter making periodic overflights whenever she was at Kelly's estate on the south shore of Long Island at Breezy Point. He also said that Caro was extremely quick and lethal with his hands.

A.J. had told Marie that Kelly would probably be "squirrelly" at first, and he was. Kelly wouldn't see them the night they arrived; he told them to stay at a motel. The next day he told them to stay at a different motel. He still wouldn't see them. Marie began to worry.

On the morning of the third day, Kelly called and told them to be at his clothing store in Brooklyn at noon.

Kelly's store was crammed to the rafters with hijacked clothes. "Jack would buy out these 18-wheeler trucks some dudeds had hijacked," remembers Caro. "He'd go down to the gubmint wharves and hep hisself." Kelly bought just about anything, from pornography to television sets, but his specialty, besides alligator skins, was clothes. He ran the sort of low-rent discount emporium where you shielded your eyes as you walked in to to avoid looking at the hallucinatory polyester shirts.

As they were introduced, Jack gave Marie a stare. He told them to get into the van and follow him home. But they didn't go to Breezy Point. They headed north, toward Queens, and finally parked in front of a house in Rego Park. Kelly opened the garage door and told them to back the van in. Marie froze. A.J. looked nervous too.

Kelly came up to the van. "My mother's house," he said, adding that they had to be careful because of a recent bust.

"When do we get the van back?" Caro asked.

"You won't need it," Kelly said.

Marie Palladini had no body wire, no gun, no radio, no badge. And now she and Caro had lost their last means of emergency escape: the van.

If it had become known that Japanese tanners were annihilating America's alligator stocks, it could have turned into an international brouhaha and an enormous embarrassment to Japan. Consequently, the Japanese buyers to whom Kelly sold most of his hides had worked out an intricate system to cover their tracks. From Kelly's the skins would go to a freight forwarder, who would take them to the ship just as it was about to leave, minimizing the risk of a leisurely customs inspection. Kelly would not be paid until the ship was on the high seas, beyond the 200-mile limit; out there, the skins could no longer be seized. The money, all cash, came from a laundry account in some local bank. Only then would Caro get his share.

Until Caro was paid for the hides, the government didn't have much of a case. Dave Hall was also determined to get the foreign buyers this time. He had chased poachers around the marshes for a solid decade, and that hadn't stopped the alligator trade. All of this meant that the operation would go on longer than expected.

For Marie, the wait was excruciating. She spent most of each day with Kelly's wife Barbara at his store. But for A.J. the two weeks in New York on this trip were as far from boring as any he had ever spent. What began as a simple alligator-hide case was turning into an accidental but far-reaching sting involving hijacking, prostitution, counterfeit money, official bribery -- it was amazing how fast and far the net spread, and it was Caro, the curly-haired Cajun poacher from Lake Arthur, La., who was stringing it out all by himself.

He told Kelly he did not want to sit around the cottage waiting for his money to arrive. He wanted some action. Kelly asked him if he could drive a mail truck. "I think he's jokin, doncha know," Caro remembered. "But he'd bought hisself a gubmint-surplus mail truck with the official decals all washed off and he hired some guy to paint it back on. I tell you what, it was realistic. Then he got a mailman's uniform somehow. Maybe he kill the guy, I doan know." Even though Kelly was a known hoodlum to law enforcement and the docks were being watched, his mail truck slipped right through.

"The one thing about outlaws," says Dave Hall, "is they're always trying to prove they're a better outlaw than the next outlaw." Caro just behaved as any outlaw would, talking crook talk, making deals, going for the brass ring ...but, at the same time, he was an undercover agent, and he was downright brilliant in that role, too ... so why not be both?

To Dave Hall, though, Caro's skill with outlaws was becoming a nightmare. He was out of control, a drunken driver in a runaway bus, picking up crooks left and right. He had almost gotten himself killed, was doing crash deals, and he wouldn't stop. He was doing a miraculous job -- this alligator case had blossomed like a jungle orchard, and Caro was going to take a lot of people down. But the defense lawyers could have a field day with A.J., who was not a cop in any sense of the word.

But he wouldn't quit. He still hadn't been paid for the hides, so he kept running around with Kelly, doing the grand circuit of New York crime. He and Kelly bought a hundred thousand in counterfeit money for around $20,000 and sold it for $25,000. He and Kelly went to a fence with a big coin and stamp collection Kelly had somehow acquired and sold it for a princely sum. They got a box of stolen requisition orders that let them walk into a warehouse and come out with thousands of dollars' worth of merchandise someone else had paid for. "It got so that in the end everybody had to come in -- Customs, the FBI -- because the activity got so broad. Some of these people was big-time .... There was one guy with two whorehouses -- he had 60 girls in one and about 40 in the other, a whole floor in an 11-story building.... These guys would say to Jack, 'Who's this?,' and they'd look me over close. I'd like to know how many times one of 'em said, 'Well, you look all right, but if you're not, dude, you're dead.'"

Meanwhile Dave Hall needed one more thing from Caro which entailed perhaps an even greater risk.

Ever since the hides had been dropped at Kelly's mother's house, their final destination had been a complete mystery. Somehow the Fish and Wildlife Service had to find out who the buyers were.

Caro had a hunch. A criminal like Kelly didn't keep records, at least not for very long. And those he kept were probably not in his house. Incriminating evidence gathered at a raid was apt to put you in jail, and if it dealt with big-time gangsters with a lot to lose, it was apt to get you killed.

The place to keep such records was in your car. If there was a raid, at least you had a chance to get away. You could scatter your files to the wind or throw them in a dumpster.

Kelly kept his beneath the right front seat. It took Caro about ten seconds to find them when he went out after dinner one night to take a walk. The consignment of hides was to be shipped to "Croskin" -- the code name for Inoue and Co. in Tokyo. Caro didn't have any chance to make copies. He simply ripped the pages out of Kelly's book and stuffed them in his pants. Tomorrow he and Marie were going to have to get out fast.

One of the agents who had been walking the street in front of Kelly's store gave Marie a sign at 11 the next morning. She was to get out of town right away. She never looked back. About an hour later, 40-odd federal agents were in Jack Kelly's front yard.

To everyone's disbelief, Caro stayed with the gang. At first Dave Hall thought he was subconsciously trying to commit suicide. But when Caro got on the phone to him a couple of days later, he told Dave Hall that he was reasonably sure Kelly, who was free on bail, didn't suspect him yet. Marie had finessed her way out of Barbara Kelly's clutches -- she said that a relative had suddenly gotten sick, or something -- and they didn't seem to connect her with the raid. Because Kelly's record book had been seized, Jack hadn't had a chance to notice the missing pages. It was conceivable that Kelly suspected him, but he seemed to be convinced that the federals had found him out through the Japanese.

In any event, he said, he had too much going on to get out yet. A.J. was being maddeningly evasive again. What did he have going on? He wouldn't say. At first Dave Hall felt Caro was simply trying to make as much money as he could while he was still in with Kelly's circle of crooks. It infuriated him, because Caro might be called as a material witness in the trial and his penchant for consorting with gangsters would give his moral character a sorry taint. Dave Hall was tempted to leave him to a deserved fate -- until A.J. called again about ten days later, from Kennedy Airport, where he was crouched behind the Delta Air Lines ticket counter.

Caro was very brief on the phone because he was very scared. He said only that he had managed to escape with his clothes, and if he didn't get the next flight out they were going to find him dead on the concourse. Dave Hall immediately wired him a ticket to New Orleans; then he alerted the airport police. If there was going to be a gunfight, he wanted to make sure the right people got shot.

Caro called from the New Orleans airport about four hours later. He said he was safe, but for the next month or so, he would need a place to live.

He ended up spending the month at Dave Hall's house, where Hall's kids developed a tremendous affection for the one-time outlaw.

The reason Caro had stayed behind in New York, it came out, was that at the same time he was working freelance for Dave Hall, and delivering hijacked goods in a postal service truck, and buying goods from junkies, and visiting mob-owned brothels on Manhattan's East Side, he had also been working undercover for the Drug Enforcement Administration -- without telling Dave Hall. Making that case had taken some time, he said, and he didn't want a failure so early in his new career.

Since the late 1970s, the alligator population has rebounded. You couldn't say that Louisiana is up to its neck in alligators, as Florida appears to be -- there they sun themselves on golf courses and are sometimes found in swimming pools -- but you could say it is up to its knees. The recovery of the American alligator is probably the greatest success story in North American wildlife conservation, and Dave Hall was very much responsible for it. So was A.J. Caro who, in the fall of 1987, disappeared.

Finding Caro was one of the main items on Dave Hall's agenda in November of that year, when he took me on a tour of his alligator poacher friends. As we drove around, he told me a little about Caro's life and career after the Kelly case. His testimony, along with Marie's, seemed certain to send Kelly to the penitentiary, so Kelly figured he might as well turn state's evidence. The counterfeiter, the brothel owner, the drug figures Caro worked -- all were taken down. Kelly talked his way out of a severe sentence, but still he wouldn't quit; he was convicted twice again of dealing in poached alligators, then seemed to vanish. Apparently, though, he'd just decided to lay low for awhile.

We never found Caro that day, nor did anyone seem to know where he was. I spoke with Dave Hall a number of times after our trip into southern Louisiana, through the now-quiet marshes where he once nearly had to shoot his way in and shoot his way back out. Each time I asked if he had heard anything about A.J. Each time the answer was no. Caro had performed so much successful undercover work for various law enforcment agencies that several bounties had been put out on him. "I'm almost certain he's been killed," he said. "He's been out of touch for way too long. In the past, when he know I was looking for him, he'd always call me back in a few days. I just think he got in over his head. Man, I would really miss old A.J. He was a personal triumph for me, but he's also basically a good dude. How many people do you suppose there are who have his kind of guts?"

Late in the spring of 1988 Dave Hall gave me a call. His first words were "He's alive."

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