Tag Archives: Boston
Commercial fisherman slips on deck, injures back, wins settlement
The plaintiff, a commercial fisherman for more than 40 years, was 61 at the time of the incident. Five years prior to the accident, the plaintiff injured his back on land, underwent a spinal fusion, and returned to fishing about three months after his surgery. For the next five years after his spinal fusion, the plaintiff worked on a scallop vessel as a deck hand. The plaintiff was picking up the pile of scallops that had been dumped on the deck. After he filled his basket with scallops, he lifted the basket and turned to his left to carry it to the shucking house. The plaintiff testified that he felt something under his foot, made another one to two steps on the deck, and then slipped and fell backwards, landing on his right side on a rock on the deck. >click to read< 14:26
New England fishermen, many from New Bedford, Fall River charged with tax offense
Federal grand juries in Providence, Rhode Island, and Boston returned separate indictments charging seven commercial fishermen with tax evasion and failing to file returns. According to the indictments, the commercial fishermen each worked for fishing companies operating primarily out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, or Point Judith, Rhode Island, and received substantial compensation. The companies allegedly paid the fishermen as independent contractors and documented that income by, among other things, filing Forms 1099 with the IRS that reported the funds paid to the fishermen. >click to read< 09;11
New Bedford fisherman pleads guilty to evading more than $431,000 in federal income taxes
Victor M. Cruz, 43, pleaded guilty to three counts of tax evasion in federal court in Boston on Tuesday. A warrant was put out for his arrest in August of 2021, and in July of last year he was arrested in Brownsville, Texas, a shrimp fishing port on the southernmost tip of the U.S.-Mexico border. Court records show how Cruz failed to report his wages over seven years working for “various commercial fishing vessels” on the Port of New Bedford. The companies were not named. >click to read< 10:26
Father, Son Clinging to Cooler Rescued After Lobster Boat Sinks in Boston Harbor
A father and son held on for their lives by clinging to a cooler and lifebuoy while stranded off the coast of Boston Wednesday evening. Officers Stephen Merrick and Garret Boyle of the Boston Police Harbor Unit responded to the 911 call at 6:30 p.m. “We’re so weak, I can’t even move. Help him up, please,” the son said to the officers during the rescue, which was captured on video. “Seeing their faces, they were tired, they were scared,” Merrick noted. The stranded men stated to police that they were out catching lobsters when their engines died. Video, >click to read< 09:24
Steve Connolly Seafood Company has closed
Steve Connolly Seafood Company, one of the last major seafood processors in Gloucester, is ending its wholesale and retail operations on Jan. 1. The company has its waterfront retail facility at 431 Main St., and a corporate site in Boston, according to its website. The website says that within eight years of Steve Connolly founding the company, it became the nation’s leading full service fresh seafood house. In 1990, the U.S. Small Business Administration named Connolly and his company the Small Business Person of the Year for Massachusetts. >click to read< 09:27
Seafood Expo North America 2019 gets underway in Boston
It was a weekend of hard work for global seafood product suppliers and processing vendors, who arrived in Boston, Massachusetts in anticipation of this year’s Seafood Expo North American/Seafood Processing North America event, taking place from 17 to 19 March. Considered to be the largest seafood event in North America, the expo saw 1,329 exhibitors from 49 countries in attendance at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center for opening day on Sunday, 17 March. >click to read<11:15
Partial transcript of Carlos Rafael’s meeting with undercover IRS agents
Documents filed in U.S. District Court in Boston Thursday show seafood mogul Carlos Rafael implicating his whole family in his alleged scheme to smuggle cash to the Azores and turn large catches of protected fish into large amounts of cash by selling them under the table. Rafael is also quoted as boasting that he pressured Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson, into giving Deputy Sheriff Antonio Freitas a raise and promotion, and in turn using Freitas to get large amounts of cash around immigration and customs at Logan Airport. The document is an official response to requests by Rafael and Freitas to be tried separately to preserve their individual rights. Read Carlos Rafael’s motion to sever his trial from the trial of Antonio Freitas. Read the government’s response, which contains Carlos Rafael’s alleged statements to undercover agents about the Antonio Freitas and the Bristol County Sheriff’s Department. The items are contained in a partial transcript of a meeting Rafael had with two men he thought were Russian businessmen but who were actually IRS agents operating under cover to learn how Rafael did business. Read the story here 08:55
F/V Iron Lady Returns Home to the Boston Waterfront with approximately 30,000 pounds of fresh swordfish and tuna
She was gone for sixteen days, dock-to-dock, making twelve longline sets in the deep waters offshore the canyons south of Nantucket. The 30,000 pound catch consists of a fairly even split between swordfish and tuna. The majority of tuna reeled-in were yellowfin, with about 20% of them being large, high-value bigeye tuna. [email protected] 16:39
News analysis: More NOAA appeal talk fails truth test ! (who knew?!) CLF Shyster in Denial.(yeah.that too.)
By Richard Gaines, Heading altered by Bore Head
The lead attorney for the government was not the only one whose statements before the second highest court in the land this week ran contrary to documented evidence.
Justice Department lawyer Joan Pepin, defending the legality of the federal government’s conversion of the Northeast groundfishery into a commodities market, was joined in that realm by her co-counsel, Peter Shelley, an attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation.
Appearing Wednesday in Boston before the First U.S. Court of Appeals, Pepin introduced a claim — contradicted by records and comments from the New England Fishery Management Council — that federal fishery regulators had already put into place a system to prevent industry consolidation that would destabilize the way of life and underlying culture of the ports, Gloucester and New Bedford and beyond from New Hampshire to North Carolina. A check of record and talks with council officials confirmed that’s not the case, as the Times reported Friday.
Following Pepin, Shelley said the New England Fishery Management Council, the arm of the federal fishery regulatory system, had adopted fishery consolidation as its official policy.
But Patricia Fiorelli, spokeswoman for the council — a part-time, 16-member panel charged with researching and writing policies for approval by the federal government — said Friday that “the council does not have a policy supporting consolidation.”
Shelley’s argument to the three-judge panel on Wednesday also condescended to scoff at concerns held and expressed by many plaintiffs — including Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk, former New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang, Congressmen Barney Frank and John Tierney and others — that major environmentally-rooted nonprofits and foundations, including the Walton Family Foundation, which operates as an adjunct to and with endowment from Wal-Mart, had gained improper influence over federal fisheries polices.
“The plaintiffs (believe),” Shelley argued, “(that) some dark force of privatization was at work — nothing could be farther from the truth. This is not Wal-Mart vs. the corner pharmacy.”
Yet the common fear among many plaintiffs that Wal-Mart, through the Walton Family Foundation and in concert with a Wal-Mart corporate partner, the Environmental Defense Fund, has achieved a controlling position in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is grounded in documented fact.
The catch share policy instituted by NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco after her appointment by President Obama and confirmation in 2009 was precisely the policy that was advocated in a policy paper written in 2008 by Lubchenco and a team of scientists and politicians. And The Walton Foundation was lead underwriter for the paper, “Oceans of Abundance,” which warned that overfishing was so depleting the oceans that jellyfish would be masters of the seas by the
middle of this century.
Lubchenco at the time was vice chairwoman of EDF board of directors; the paper has since been widely discredited in both scientific and academic spheres.
One of the appeal plaintiffs’ attorneys, Gloucester fisheries lawyer Stephen Ouellette, alluded to the concern across the industry that the catch share system creates a business model that invites external investment. The worry, he said, is over the future erosion of the local ownership feature that has defined the groundfishery for centuries.
“There is a large political movement seeking to force a catch share system on all the fisheries,” Ouellette said. READ MORE!
http://www.gloucestertimes.com/local/x550068870/News-analysis-More-NOAA-appeal-talk-fails-truth-test
Fishing appeal on fed docket- Catch share challenge
A three-judge panel of the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston is due to hear arguments today in a suit alleging the federal government’s re-engineering of the Northeast groundfishery into a quasi commodity market trading in catch shares beginning in 2010 was illegally introduced by denying industry the referendum promised by federal law.Read more.http://www.gloucestertimes.com/topstories/x1884284835/Fishing-appeal-on-fed-docket
