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

Common Cause Magazine, July-August, 1991

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."