Making Waves : Nature: Risking his life to record the killing of dolphins, Sam LaBudde changed from unfocused drifter to darling of the environmental movement.

Fluffy and white as snow drifts, a pair of big, beautiful poodles bound into the glacier-sleek marble foyer, nuzzling the man with the unshaven shadow around his chin, the safari garb, the cowboy boots.

He reaches to pat them--this new Indiana Jones of the environment, just back from Alaska--tenderly caressing these luxurious specimens of nature in another icily opulent environment.

Lean and intense, Sam LaBudde, 33, has lived for a decade as a drifter. Now he has become a swashbuckling hero to environmentalists. He survives on adventure (“Adrenalin is an addictive drug.”) and grins at the mention of Indiana Jones (“I sort of feel like that sometimes, I guess.”).

Indiana used to be only the place he came from; but LaBudde has just blown into the Hollywood scene, bringing with him tales to rival those of “the lost ark.”

Wielding a video camera, LaBudde has documented the slaughter of a hit-list of marine mammals.

Risking cement galoshes, he hired out as a fisherman on a tuna boat in order to film their killing of dolphins while fishing in Central American waters. Swimming in shark-infested North Pacific waters, he captured the mass destruction of sea life in miles of gossamer drift-net mesh. Roaming a port town along China’s Yangtze River, he aimed his lens at tiger paws and talismanic monkey bones stacked up in market stalls. Last month he went after abuses of walrus, and polar bear “subsistence hunting” in Alaska; wired with a microphone, he bartered a half-ounce of hashish for an eight-pound walrus tusk (the animal’s head hacked off by ax or chain saw) on an islet in the Bering Strait.

Now he’s returned from an East Coast junket, where his style in the media shark tank has been just as direct. His usual gambit is to amble into the lobby of a major television network, ring up a big-time producer and say something like, hey, my name is Sam LaBudde and I have some devastating footage of animal killings.

Traveling from place to place, he rarely leaves a telephone number. Last spring he rented a pad in San Francisco, though he’s hardly seen the inside yet. He gets paid on a need-to-have basis, enough to see him through the coming month, by whichever of a half-dozen environmental groups he happens to be working for.

He’s spent the last weekend at a New York wayside house that costs about as much as the tip for dinner for two at Chasen’s.

His new digs here is the Bel-Air mansion of Jerry and Ann Moss--the M in A&M; Records. Chez Moss, his bed is spread in a white eyelet coverlet; he snacks on salmon, allows himself to be kneaded by the Moss’ masseur and pets the poodles.

“Hey,” he says of his new environs, “whatever works.”

But the alliance of the drifter and the socialite is serious business, one that Ann Moss and LaBudde recognize as a potent pact between courage and connections.

Powerful environmentalists, the Mosses have spearheaded a night of consciousness-raising on the dolphin-killing issue, to be held next month at the A&M; soundstage.

Friends co-sponsoring the event are director Richard Donner (“Superman,” “Lethal Weapon” I & II), producer Lauren Schuler-Donner and “Batman” producer Peter (and Lynda) Guber, plus the media environmental groups, ECO and EMA, and a guest list that’s 2,500 strong--”Sigourney Weaver, Jack Nicholson, Henry Winkler, Sally Fields . . .,” Moss’ secretary ticks off the names.

LaBudde will be a keynote speaker, showing his dolphin footage. Already the film has made most major news shows and a Congressional committee hearing. Currently a baker’s dozen of Hollywood producers is on the trail of a feature film treatment of his experience.

Sitting on the patio, overlooking the swath of garden, LaBudde recounts his story. He alternates between the exhortatory rhetoric of a born-again environmentalist (“The extinction of a species is the ultimate sin!”) and laconic irony, occasionally ripping at a pack of matches and flicking a cigarette at the glittering facets of a crystal ashtray.

His tale, he says, begins back in grade school in southern Indiana, where he grew up surrounded by hills and cornfields, far from the ocean.

Part Cherokee, part French-Norwegian, he would raise his hand in music class, requesting to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “There was power and vision in that music,” he now says wistfully.

By high school, however, he had gone from a straight-A student and a patriot to a recalcitrant teen-ager who refused to stand up for the national anthem.

Impatient with the world of cheerleaders, jocks and video heads, the son of scientists (his mother is a botanist, his father a biochemist) became a solitary outsider. “I didn’t want to feel I was part of a system. I didn’t want to get lost in that and cut myself a piece of the big-time.”

So, after barely scraping through high school, LaBudde bailed out, beginning his peripatetic existence and an eclectic chain of occupations.

While friends were going to college, marrying and starting families, LaBudde was roaming the California wilderness, climbing the Grand Tetons, planting trees in Oregon, laying cable and planting sensors to locate Northwest oil deposits.

As he wandered, he increasingly became aware of his Indian heritage and determined “to see this land (as it was) before Christopher Columbus showed up.” After staring at miles of charred timberland and camera-toting tourists in once-rich Indian hunting grounds, he retreated farther from mankind, to Alaska. There he worked as a machinist’s apprentice, a seismic explorer and a fisherman, and he staked out five acres of land reachable only by helicopter or kayak.

Next he hopped on a motorcycle and rode back to Indiana, getting a college degree in biology in two-and-a-half years. Then he went out to pick apples in Wisconsin. Finding his way to the Florida Keys, he learned scuba diving, while waiting tables and sending out resumes. He wanted to get to the Brazilian rain forest; instead he got a job as an observer for the National Marine Fisheries Service on a Japanese trawler in the Bering Sea.

Bored with “counting fish,” he bought an old Volkswagen Rabbit “that ran like a scalded dog” and headed south. After roaming the Sierra Nevadas, he dipped down to San Francisco--the nesting place of burgeoning environmental groups.

With just enough money in his wallet to make it through a couple of weeks, he began making the rounds--the Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, and finally Earth Island Institute, an umbrella organization for environmental groups. There he happened upon a copy of Earth Island Journal, featuring the dolphin slaughter by tuna fishermen.

These mammals--who milk-feed their young, who were revered by the Greeks at the Oracle of Delphi, who save Homo sapiens at sea, who die of desolation when separated from their families, who get ulcers from stress--were being chased, bombed with explosives and killed in the pursuit of yellowfin tuna.

Schools of yellowfin and dolphins often travel together, especially in the Pacific waters off Central and northern South America; and it was the massive capture of dolphins in tuna seining nets that led to passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. The goal of the act was the incremental reduction of the annual dolphin kill to “insignificant levels approaching zero.” But during the Reagan administration, the quota countdown was halted at 20,500. Since the bill’s enactment, environmentalists say at least 800,000 dolphins have died in the nets of U.S. tuna fishermen.

“I was appalled,” says LaBudde, when he read the story. With typical impulsiveness, he proposed getting what the animal protection groups needed most, hard evidence of the killings in the form of live film footage.

Both the directors at Earth Island Institute and Stan Minasian, head of the Marine Mammal Fund, recognized the dangers of such a venture. Could LaBudde really pull it off? Besides, the guy was a drifter; he’d been living out of his battered Volkswagen and looked like he hadn’t changed clothes in days.

Neither a video camera nor financing was forthcoming. On his own, LaBudde headed his VW toward Ensenada, Mexico. The U.S. tuna industry prohibits National Marine Fisheries Service observers from carrying cameras aboard their boats. LaBudde hoped fishermen in Mexico would be less sensitive; at any rate, he would be working undercover.

For three weeks in the Mexican fishing port, LaBudde slept on the beach, prowling the waterfront looking for work. Finally, in September, a boat under Panamanian registry, the Maria Luisa, took him on.

With 24 hours before sailing, LaBudde, whose car had been driven back to the U.S. by a friend, caught a bus to the border, a trolley into San Diego, and called Minasian. He could swing a small camera, he said; Minasian said he’d have one down by noon the next day, but the camera missed the flight and the next flight was delayed. “I was basically bouncing off the walls,” LaBudde says.

By the time the camera arrived, he had just time to catch a cab and get to the boat 15 minutes before the Maria Luisa left port.

For the next 4 1/2 months, LaBudde played his most dangerous role, that of a spy on a boat ruled by a dark, vitriolic captain and 20 men “hanging out with their egos.”

“It’s hard when everything you do for five months is premeditated. It was a real schizophrenic situation to be in.”

LaBudde brought out his 8-millimeter Sony Camcorder that first evening to get the crew accustomed to it. It was a present from his wealthy father, he said. “I was really nervous about it.”

The first time the seining net was cast (in the lingo, a set on dolphins), he had planned to lay low. He was on the deck crew; his job was to haul in the net and pick out the dead and dying dolphins.

But the set turned into “a riot of carnage.” “It looked like somebody was trying to drown a cavalry.”

For the crew the procedure was routine. When a school of dolphin was spotted by a lookout in the crow’s nest, the Maria Luisa gave chase, running them at 20 knots for nearly 20 minutes, until they were exhausted.

Then four speedboats were lowered over the side and roared off starboard, forming a staggered line blocking the dolphins’ route.

To maneuver the school, the fishermen used seal bombs, small sticks of dynamite, lighting them with their cigars.

A skiff slid off the mother boat, anchoring the seining net, which was laid out in a curtain around the dolphins.

Swimming in furious circles, lashing the water into white froth, the dolphins shrieked in panic, seeking to escape. LaBudde dove for his camera in the hole of the ship. Stunned by the violence, he nonetheless stopped his filming now and then to comment casually to the crew, “Gee! This is really something, isn’t it.”

“I wanted to be normal in their eyes,” he says.

As the net was pulled aboard, a hundred or more dolphins were entangled in the mesh, some already drowned, some still struggling as the net was wound up through the rolling mill of the powerblock wrench. Those that were wriggling as they rose to the block were lifeless as they descended on the other side, crushed in the narrow aperture.

“The first dolphin I ever touched left me bloody up to my elbows,” says LaBudde, holding up his arms as if to demonstrate.

“I remember looking at their eyes. They were dead, but they still all looked different. If you’d killed people their eyes would also look different.

For the rest of the crew, however, the set was cause for celebration and laughter. They had caught their first fish of the trip--a single 40-pound yellowfin tuna lay at the bottom of the net.

But LaBudde was soon to confront another sort of threat. A malingering crew member, playing sick in order to be sent home for Christmas, began observing the gringo. “I know you’re up to something,” he’d taunt. And LaBudde would retort, “Adolpho, maybe you really aren’t so sick either.”

Before LaBudde was exposed, Adolpho was put ashore, and the gringo turned his hand to other pursuits--specifically to spicing up the Maria Luisa’s menu. The cook had earned the nickname “Juan Papas,” or “Johnny Potatoes.” And when he took a day off, it was easy for LaBudde to slip into his place.

On his return, “Juan Papas” was content to peel potatoes, while LaBudde regaled the crew with cherry pies and frosted layer cakes. “I was a real flame-thrower in the kitchen,” he boasts.

He also exercised autonomy over his small domain, the only turf where the captain did not reign, and, even more importantly, he had a locking cabinet in which to hide his video camera and free time to film the sets.

But if the food on board the Maria Luisa was now good, the fishing was not, and soon the captain was also put ashore. His replacement was a big Basque with ideas of his own.

The Basque liked his potatoes peeled; the gringo with the name from Brittany wanted the vitamins in the skin. Then the two fought over the cooking time for turkey. Although LaBudde was afraid of losing his treasured position, this was comic opera compared to the difficulties ahead.

The fishing continued, better than before. On New Year’s day, 1988, the Maria Luisa made a set on a school of Costa Rican spinner dolphins, the world’s rarest, numbering just 9,000 a decade ago. In an afternoon, the fishermen had killed 200 to 300, or about 5% of the species that remained. This time they snagged about a dozen tuna.

But perhaps the most poignant kill for LaBudde came the day they rounded up a school of some 50 common dolphins ( Delphinus delphis ) . Unlike other kinds of dolphins, they don’t roil into panicky balls in the net, but swim in graceful, undulating chains, mothers and babies side by side.

“They were looking for a way out,” says LaBudde. The proscribed procedure at this point is a backdown, in which the fishing boat backs up, forcing the net’s float line below the ocean surface to wash the dolphins out.

But the captain called, “Cuantos delfins en la red?” “How many dolphins in the net?”

“About 50,” the answer came.

“Haul it in,” the captain yelled.

“I cracked,” says LaBudde, who had been filming the dolphins’ squealing, shrieking terror. None of the 50 dolphins survived.

Locking his camera below, LaBudde returned on deck to find a final horror. The captain, a pin knife in hand, was expertly fileting a dolphin into steaks.

Controlling his own explosion, LaBudde again jumped for his camera. “If he looks up now I’m history,” he thought, as he began to film the scene. And after a double-take, the captain did look up, scowling, menacing. Concrete galoshes.

LaBudde forced a grin, the naive gringo again. “Oh, gee! Are dolphins good to eat?”

The captain nodded. Dolphin was the principal dish for dinner. This time LaBudde did not dispute the menu; he simply neither cooked nor ate.

When the Maria Luisa made port in Panama City in January, LaBudde says, “I wanted to get off that boat so bad.” There was an incredible release. “They can throw me in the ocean with concrete galoshes,” he thought after all; he wasn’t going back to the Maria Luisa.

LaBudde had nearly five hours of film footage, which would be edited down to a powerful 11 minutes. He also had a cause he believed in.

A loner, he exhibits little empathy for humans. “I shake people down for what they can tell me, then I go looking for other people to plunder for their knowledge.”

But the dolphins had touched him. After that first set, he noted in his journal, “There are aspects of life that are so ugly they’re hard to reconcile with your hopes and expectations.”

By the time LaBudde ends his tale it is twilight, and the tip of his cigarette glimmers in the dusk.

“I’m burned out,” he says. “I’m beginning to feel like the coroner of the environment.” Recently he laughed and it depressed him, a reminder that he never laughs anymore.

He concedes that some small progress has been made by environmentalists confronting the 28 fishing boats that constitute the small but politically powerful U.S. tuna fleet. A bill is before a House subcommittee that would require tuna can labels to bear a warning that the fish might have been caught by methods “known to kill dolphins.” And Hollywood stars are standing by, ready to make television advertisements for brands using tuna from boats that employ nets that do not ensnare dolphins.

But if it’s not dolphins it’s walrus; if it’s not walrus it’s polar bears. “I’m singing the same song with different words,” LaBudde says.

He would like to set up an environmental strike force called Earth Core that would send biologists into the field to document 10 species at a time and work out plans to save them from extinction.

Meanwhile, before the night of the dolphins and his rendezvous with the stars, LaBudde is checking out of civilization. Going to the desert. “I want to lie down and cry at the moon,” he says.