NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — August 14, 2012 — Nearly 14 years after his scallop boat was boarded by the Coast Guard at sea, Larry M. Yacubian is suing the federal government for malicious prosecution that ran him out of business and ruined him financially.
Yacubian has filed suit in federal court seeking unspecified damages and expenses for abuse of process and malicious prosecution.
"I was banished to the gulag. I couldn't work again in a profession that I had been in for years," Yacubian told The Associated Press in an interview Monday.
The suit was filed after the Commerce Department allowed the clock to run out on the former Westport fisherman's $15 million administrative claim filed six months ago, thereby dismissing it.
It's the latest chapter in a legal saga that has left Yacubian — for allegedly fishing in a closed area and making a false statement — forbidden from commercial fishing anywhere, without a boat, and without the Westport farmhouse that was in his wife's family for generations.
Yacubian's case is at the center of the continuing saga of the well-documented renegade prosecution in the Northeast Regional Office of the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Yacubian's plight has gradually unfolded in public over the past two or three years, culminating in a Commerce Department's special master declaring in 2011 that Yacubian had been punished all out of proportion to any offense he may have committed.
His lawsuit also contends a government enforcement officer's evidence helpful to him at trial was kept out of court through coercion by the New England enforcement office.
Twice the government also blocked the sale of his boat and his permit so he could pay his legal bills, ruining Yacubian financially. Yacubian says he was thereby coerced into a settlement by the government.
Two spokespersons for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
Yacubian's case was hailed at the time as the first successful prosecution of a fisherman based solely on the then-new Boattrax system. (Boattrax is the first satellite-based tracking system, following boats via transponders fitted to each one.)
Read the full story in the New Bedford Standard Times