Two Cultures Clash Over the Scarcity of Caviar

Back in the U.S.S.R., said Vitaly Prokopchuk, people seldom observed hunting rules or worried about disappearing species like the Beluga sturgeon.

“People who were poachers weren’t even secretive about it,” said Prokopchuk, who moved to the United States from his native Ukraine 16 years ago as a religious refugee and now works as a Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy. “They would dynamite fish if they thought they could put food on the table or make a little money on the side.”

The problem comes, the burly 31-year-old lawman observed, when immigrants bring those old habits here to their new homeland. As one of only two bilingual Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking officers in the Sheriff’s Department, Prokopchuk is a leading voice of law and order for a community of 75,000 to 100,000 recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union -- one of the largest Slavic immigrant communities in North America.

His most recent headache is a caviar poaching ring that the California Department of Fish and Game uncovered in the warren of Ukrainian auto body repair shops in North Highlands, a northern suburb of Sacramento that is part of Prokopchuk’s turf. The several dozen body shops -- wedged in side-by-side stalls in several self-storage complexes -- are mainly engaged in buying cheap wrecked cars at auctions and patching them up for resale in major American cities.

For some, however, a cultural familiarity with caviar and how it is prepared for sale has developed into a species-threatening sideline dealing in the salty black and golden eggs of the Sacramento River sturgeon.

In recent years, traditional sources of Caspian Sea caviar have collapsed overseas under the pressure of overfishing and smuggling of the Beluga, Osetra and Sevruga sturgeon that produce the prized dark roe.

Domestic sturgeon farms, including three in California, have cropped up in an attempt to meet the demand for caviar. But raising the slow-to-mature sturgeon, whose females sometimes spawn only once in four years, is an expensive and laborious process. As a result, high-quality California white sturgeon caviar costs nearly as much to buy as the Caspian original, up to $80 an ounce.

This has made poaching the native sturgeon that lives in the Sacramento and Columbia river systems a profitable criminal enterprise. The fondness for caviar among the Soviet immigrants makes it an attractive commodity for poachers.

So far, said Ellen Pikitch, an international sturgeon expert at the University of Miami Pew Institute for Ocean Science, the white sturgeon population in the Sacramento and Columbia river systems remains relatively healthy.

Of the 27 species in the world, the white sturgeon is one of only two not considered to be on the road to extinction. But Pikitch cautions that as the value of white sturgeon caviar increases, so does the threat of poaching.

“New information about the extent of illegal fishing is very disturbing,” said Pikitch. “We don’t know if the recent arrests are isolated or just the tip of the iceberg, but it is really important that law enforcement keeps a lot of eyes on the water to make sure these fish are safe.”

According to state game agents, Sacramento’s sturgeon poachers illegally catch the fish or buy it from local anglers.

Professional fishing guide Rene Villanueva said he sometimes finds the gutted carcasses of sturgeon, often weighing several hundred pounds each, on of the banks of the upper sloughs in the Sacramento River Delta.

“The guys who do this are sneaky. They come out at night in shallow water where the sturgeon spawn and snag the fish with giant treble hooks,” said Villanueva. “You just see the carcasses split open and the roe is gone.”

Generally, however, the poachers process the whole sturgeon, selling the meat door-to-door in apartment complexes with large immigrant populations and the caviar to Russian restaurants and delicatessens in Sacramento or San Francisco’s Sunset district, a former Irish neighborhood that in recent years has attracted thousands of Eastern European and Asian immigrants.

Earlier this month, wildlife agents operating in the Sacramento River delta south of the state capital arrested nine people, including a San Francisco shop owner accused of selling poached caviar for $15 an ounce from his Geary Street deli and a North Highlands body shop owner alleged to be the ringleader of the caviar gang. It was the third wave of sturgeon poaching arrests in three years.

Two years ago in a major sting dubbed “Operation Beluga,” Fish and Game agents arrested 22 people, including a mother-son team in Citrus Heights, another Sacramento suburb with a large Ukrainian and Russian population. In that case, the son was collecting the sturgeon and roe and the mother sold it from the counter of her small grocery story.

Last year, agents cracked down on another smaller ring, centered in San Jose, that specialized in selling sturgeon meat to Asian markets in that city.

“It’s a growing, very serious problem,” said Lt. Kathy Ponting, a supervisor in the Fish and Game special investigations unit that conducted the raids.

One of the ways Fish and Game hopes to combat poaching is to find a way to easily and accurately test whether caviar collected by game wardens comes illegally from the wild or legitimately from commercial fish farms.

Jeff Rodzen, a wildlife forensic specialist with the department, thinks this can be done by comparing the fatty acid or lipid content of the roe. Commercial sturgeon, including those raised at the nearby Stolt Sea Farm and Tsar Nicoulai facilities outside Sacramento, are generally fed pellets made from South American anchovies that have more protein and fat than the food of bottom-feeding wild sturgeons.

Another possibility, said Rodzen, who has a doctorate in genetics from UC Davis, is to establish genetic markers that separate farm-raised fish from wild fish.

“As this becomes a bigger problem,” Rodzen said, “we need to develop something that could be actually used in court.” An accurate genetic profile, for example, could match the gutted sturgeon carcasses on the banks of a slough to the caviar confiscated by game wardens in the field.

When Fish and Game agents raided two Lake Highlands body shops earlier this month in “Operation Beluga II,” sheriff’s deputy Prokopchuk was at their side, acting as interpreter and guide to the insular immigrant community.

The agents arrested accused ringleader Nikolay Krasnodemskiy, 34, and confiscated several jars of caviar, processing equipment and fishing gear. In another shop, they arrested Mark Tarasenko, 20; agents said they found 10 illegal explosive devices in his possession. Three other suspects, Vasily Agapov, 41, Pavel Kalinovskiy, 34, and Oleg Beknazarov, 32, are accused of approaching undercover game agents posing as fishermen and asking to buy their sturgeon catch.

When the arrested men saw Prokopchuk, some of them recognized him.

“I know many of these people from the community or from church,” said Prokopchuk, whose father was pastor of an underground church in Ukraine. Many of the Ukrainians in the area, including Prokopchuk, moved here at the urging of a Sacramento-based Christian radio program that was broadcast into their former homeland in the 1980s and won many converts.

Helped by Rep. Dan Lungren, a Republican then representing Long Beach whose district is now in the Chico area, thousands of Ukrainian Protestants won visas to the United States on grounds of religious persecution. Many settled in Sacramento County.

Prokopchuk said he plans to write a column for the Russian-language newspaper the Speaker about caviar and poaching. Few people in the Slavic immigrant community, he said, can grasp the American law that makes it illegal for sport fishermen to sell their catch.

“Under the typical way of thinking,” Prokopchuk said, “people in the community still think it is OK to buy from fishermen. They feel that if a man spends money on gas and spends all day fishing, then what is wrong paying for the fish? Plus it’s fresh fish. I don’t think most of the buyers knew they were doing anything wrong.”

This perhaps explains the shock and embarrassment in the Russian-speaking community when the arrests for poaching were announced earlier this month. Russian-language newspapers featured two crime stories, one about a 25-year-old Ukrainian mother who was raped in the parking lot of a Sacramento junior college and the other about the poaching incident.

In San Francisco, some owners of the many Russian food shops along Geary Street were horrified to hear that one of their colleagues, delicatessen owner Mark Golmyan, 54, had been arrested on charges of selling Sacramento River caviar in his corner shop, redolent with the smells of smoked sausages and mackerel, beet and potato salads.

Golmyan, caught on camera by television crews who had been tipped off, declined to talk with a reporter who visited his shop. But a few blocks down the street, his friend Faina Avrutin, owner of Israel’s Kosher Market and, like Golmyan, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, was adamant.

“There was no point to this,” Avrutin said. “This was not terrorism. He [Golmyan] is a good guy, a good businessman. In Russia, you cannot go to jail for buying or selling fish.”