According to a report in the Gloucester (Mass.) Daily Times by staff writer Richard Gaines, Gloucester Seafood Display Auction President Larry Ciulla learned while waiting to testify before a Senate subcommittee in Boston on Monday that despite an apology from the Secretary of Commerce for inappropriate behavior by NOAA Enforcement staff, his business would still be ordered shut down for 15 days.
GLOUCESTER, Mass. — June 22, 2011– Barely a month after the Ciulla family was issued a public apology and paid reparations for a decade of relentless federal fisheries enforcement harassment at their fish auction that uncovered "no credible evidence," NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco has now ordered the business to close for 15 days.
The decision, based on an interpretation of a March 1, 2010, settlement of the three cases which interlocked, was transmitted to Paul Muniz, attorney for the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction, via email Monday — while he and auction President Larry Ciulla were in Boston's Faneuil Hall.
Invited to speak to a Senate subcommittee, Ciulla, as the region's primary target of law enforcement zeal and excess, was about to testify along four other industry representatives when the email arrived on Muniz' smart phone.
The message came, Ciulla said, just as Eric Schwaab, who heads the National Marine Fisheries Service, was explaining how NOAA had turned the corner and was reforming the law enforcement system that helped debilitate and demoralize the fleet.
Lubchenco's order is based on a provision of an opinion by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke that an agreement in the March 1, 2010, settlement for the auction to close non-consecutively for 35 days as part of the price for a clean record could not be revisited.
Locke's opinion was based on the findings of a special judicial master whose report on the most egregious cases of miscarried justice prompted a joint apology to the Ciullas during an extraordinary joint teleconference by Locke and Lubchenco that was podcast from Gloucester on May 16.
In her letter, Lubchenco wrote that she was enforcing Locke's decision to follow that part of Special Master Charles B. Swartwood III's recommendation to reinstate the remaining portion of the penalty in the omnibus settlement, which was intended to close the book on the government's campaign against the auction, holding it free of any lingering legal liabilities.
"I won, but they couldn't accept it," Ciulla told the Times in a telephone interview this afternoon. "It's almost like double jeopardy. What am I going to do about it? I haven't got a clue."
He said any lost day of business would be costly and disruptive to the boats and the buyers who have made the auction at the tip of Harbor Loop the No. 1 platform for the sale of seafood from the Gulf of Maine.
NOAA did not immediately respond to a series of questions about Lubchenco's order, or a request for an interview.
Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.
Read the letter from NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco to the attorney for the Gloucester Auction.