East Hampton Trustees, Marine Patrol Call for Stiffer Penalties for Shellfish Poaching Amid Onslaught

Members of the East Hampton Town Trustees and East Hampton Town Police Department Marine Patrol are calling for steeper fines and more serious criminal charges linked to the illegal harvesting of shellfish and crabs in town waters after a summer in which officials say an organized community of poachers “pillaged” town waters for blue claw crabs and other shellfish.

Marine Patrol officers issued more than 140 violations for breaking shellfishing rules this past summer, primarily for failure to have a town shellfish license, which is required in all town waters and available only to residents, Senior Harbormaster Tim Treadwell told the Board of Trustees on Monday evening, September 26. There is little evidence, he added, that the perpetrators are being held accountable in court — or that the relatively small fines issued will act as much of a deterrent.

The onslaught this summer found groups of a dozen or more people setting upon the local ponds — Georgica Pond in East Hampton and Mecox Bay in Water Mill, in particular, because of their robust stocks of blue claw crab — and gathering crabs and shellfish. When approached by authorities, the groups would scatter.

“Georgica has gotten overrun with out-of-towners who seem to have some sort social media connection, like there’s some sort of poaching club that they belong to — and I’m being a little sarcastic, but it seems like that — and they get this information that they can come to Georgica and Mecox. Southampton has had the same problem,” Treadwell said. “They’re well aware of the fact that what they are doing is illegal. People have said we should put signs in different languages, but they know it’s illegal — they run from us.”

Since a Marine Patrol officer caught four out of at least a dozen people who were discovered wading in the waters of Napeague Harbor late at night in June — the others escaped in vehicles, the lone officer unable to halt them all — the unit has issued 114 summonses for taking shellfish without a town license and another 31 for violating other shellfishing rules. More than half the licensing summonses were issued in Georgica Pond, where officers mounted a concerted effort throughout the summer to catch the poachers in the act.

Treadwell said that they know from those they have caught that the poaching perpetrators are mostly coming from the boroughs of New York City and are often not carrying any identification. They coordinate with each other through a network of lookouts, warning calls and cellphone communications and employ various other tactics to avoid detection, capture or punishment when caught.

Treadwell and the Trustees agreed that some new tools are needed to enforce compliance with town rules that make crabs and shellfish in local waters off-limits to nonresidents.

Treadwell said he would like to see the town attorney’s office find a way to create a new, more serious level of violation specific to poaching in town code that would carry severe punishments more akin to criminal charges or much higher fines.

The fine for shellfishing without a town license is $150, he noted — perhaps a deterrent for someone just gathering shellfish for themselves, but probably not for someone who is harvesting shellfish to sell illicitly on the black market.

“If someone gets caught toe-clamming out there … maybe $150 is a reasonable fine. But if you’re pillaging the harbor or taking hundreds of crabs and selling them, the fine should be $500 — or more,” he said. “The problem is they are selling these blue claw crabs, and they’re making way more money than these fines — if they even come back and pay these fines, which remains to be seen.”

The Trustees were quick to applaud the suggestion and asked Treadwell to draw up a rough draft of some “reasonable” thresholds for what should be considered a more serious level of breaking shellfishing rules than the typical miscreant or uninformed violator.

Trustee Mike Martinsen, who grows oysters in Lake Montauk and works as a bayman, said that he would like to see the rules locally mimic the punishments that commercial baymen face if they violate various rules, including things like impounding vehicles involved in the illicit activity.

“If a bayman were to go work at night in an unconditional area, they lose their vehicle, they’re charged with a felony, they lose their right to make a living in that way — so nobody does it. It works,” Martinsen said.

The Trustees’ attorney, Chris Carillo, noted that such stiff penalties against licensed commercial fishermen are for violating State Department of Environmental Conservation fisheries’ bylaws, not town codes. He wondered if the state’s officers might collaborate with the town — though Treadwell noted that the state’s enforcement is spread even more thin than the town’s.

“We talked about doing a sting with them,” he added, but noted that such a thing can require a large commitment of man hours and may be for naught if they pick a stretch of nights when one of the organized groups does not turn up.

Carillo also spotlighted one of Treadwell’s points, that many of the summonses issued are what officers call “ghost summonses” that are simply ignored by the person who it was issued to, who may not have had identification and may have given a false name.

“Like Mike said, it’s a shame that a commercial fisherman here can lose their livelihood, but these commercial fishermen from the city are getting a slap on the wrist and don’t have to show up for court because they don’t have an ID,” Carillo said. “It’s a major hole in what we are trying to do here.”

He lamented Treadwell’s tale of the bust in Napeague Harbor in June where only four out of 12 poachers were apprehended and only one of them had identification — the other three were sent away without summonses, and without the certainty that they were even who they said they were, and it’s unknown whether they ever returned to court or paid their fines.

“If we only had one summons issued to a guy that actually came up with an ID, that’s not much deterrent to these groups every summer,” he said.

Treadwell noted that the return of summonses was helped considerably this summer from recent years past by the creation of the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication, which restored the ability of those issued violation summonses to simply mail back their tickets with a guilty plea and a check for the fine listed. That practice had been suspended in the Town Justice Court by state judicial process reforms in 2019.

He encouraged the idea that the town could come with a higher level of violations that was tied to exactly the sorts of characteristics of the poaching operations that Treadwell had described: large volumes of harvested crabs, and several people working together. He suggested fines for such things, or for multiple offenses could be pushed into the thousands of dollars.

“If you impound their vehicle, that word is going to get out,” Trustee David Cataletto offered.

Sara Davison, the executive director of the Friends of Georgica Pond community organization, said that the town needs to start “thinking out of the box” about how to rein in the poaching problem in the pond.

“The situation has really gotten out of hand,” she said. “There’s the ecological issue of taking too many crabs, which are an important predator and recycle the pond. There’s the disturbance of the peace by all this harvesting at night. And there’s the interference with the local enjoyment of the pond.”

Treadwell also asked that the Trustees encourage residents to report suspicious activity on the waters, especially at night because his unit’s officers are spread thin.

“They can call the police at 631-537-7575, the nonemergency number and make that complaint,” he said. “It’s hard for us to be everywhere. We have a lot of water in this town that we have to keep an eye on.”