April 3, 2017 — All eyes are on Carlos Rafael’s sizeable load of assets—32 fishing vessels, 44 permits and a business named Carlos Seafood—now that he’s facing up to 20 years of jail time when he receives his sentence in June.
His guilty plea agreement with the US government agrees to forfeiture of all 13 of his groundfish vessels, but his sizeable fleet of scallop vessels aren’t mentioned. A spokesperson at the Department of Justice (DOJ) declined to speculate on whether the federal government could seize these after his sentencing in June if Rafael couldn’t come up with the money to pay his fines, set at up to $7 million in the plea agreement.
New Bedford mayor Jon Mitchell, a former federal prosecutor, said there is flexibility within the terms of the plea agreement.
“Based on my experience, he’s probably looking at least three to four years in prison and a substantial fine,” Mitchell told Undercurrent News.
Rafael is facing multiple counts of federal crimes, some of which include a maximum sentence of five years and one of which provides a maximum sentence of 20 years.
“But I think the bigger question is what happens to his groundfish permits,” Mitchell said. “They may be subject to forfeiture, but his forfeiture obligation can be subject in a number of ways.”
Typically, in other cases where the government seizes assets, those assets are sold by the government in an open auction; however, this case is unusual, making the asset sale process possibly run differently, a spokesperson for the DOJ told Undercurrent.
Such a sale at a government auction raises big concerns for Mitchell.
“There’s a chance they may be bought up by government interests outside the port, and that scenario may have a direct impact on the industry here,” he said.
Mitchell plans to argue for Carlos’s permits to remain in the port of New Bedford, the largest seafood port in the United States.
The DOJ and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) could substitute cash for the forfeiture of vessels by allowing Carlos to pay an equivalent amount of cash, attained through a sale of the vessel to a New Bedford buyer, instead of simply handing the vessels over to them to sell, Mitchell said.