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 Fishing charter operator gets probation,
forfeits boat
By ARNOLD MARKOWITZ
Waterfront News Fishing Columnist
Stan Saffan, the face of charter boat fishing’s dark side, painted the flagpole at Haulover Park Marina. Give him some good-guy points. He donated and planted trees there, too. More points for that. He’s rescued injured pelicans and brought them to a seabird infirmary. Hooray.
If you operate beyond the fringes of ethics and honesty, you too ought to be earning points like those and these:
Sometimes Saffan took underprivileged kids fishing. Once he played Santa Claus. He’s a slender fellow with an aquiline nose, physically wrong for the role of a jolly old elf but a good sport when the favor was requested by a Miami-Dade County commissioner.
That was Sally Heyman, one of 46 spectators crowding the federal courtroom in Fort Lauderdale where Saffan, owner of two Haulover-based charter boats named Therapy IV, was sentenced to five years on probation for violating a law against landing and keeping undersized sailfish.
What, you didn’t know that’s a felony? Saffan knew it. Government prosecutors accused him, his two captains and two mates of doing it over and over again. They all admitted it and made deals to plead guilty.
They also admitted to other charges that were dropped in trade for their guilty pleas: Trying to hide the short fish from Florida Fish and Wildlife investigators. Pressuring easily-gulled tourists with no offshore fishing experience into signing contracts for expensive trophy mounts by Gray Taxidermy, while lying that the taxidermist needed those same sailfish for parts to be included in the mounts. Wire fraud, for charging deposits to the victims’ credit cards.
In fact, large operators like Gray don’t use any real fish parts in making a sailfish trophy. It’s all artificial, popped from a mold. All they need for an accurate trophy is the length and girth of the fish, plus photos. Two men with wet hands can hold a wet sailfish still enough for a third to measure it while another (dry-handed) snaps pictures.
Then back over the side the fish goes, unharmed if the job’s been done carefully. On Therapy IV, those fish were gaffed and ice-boxed for sucker bait to make customers feel the fish had died for them. After that, how could they turn down a trophy mount?
In separate sentence hearings Ralph Pegram and Adam Augusto, the mates who broke laws with Saffan, each got a year and a day in prison plus two years probation. Brian Schick and Sean Lang, captains of the two Therapy IV vessels, got no jail time and three years probation.
If it seems like rank has unfair privileges, we’d better add that the mates had prior criminal records for drug violations. That kind of history swims back to bite a guy who gets into other trouble later on.
Could be that it’s unfair anyhow, with the boss Saffan’s sentence to probation following right behind the grunt Augusto’s sentence to prison on the same morning. They sat together in court on May 21. Augusto’s case was heard first.
Court-appointed lawyer Randee Golder said she thought his year-and-a-day sentence was fair. Later, after Saffan’s no-prison sentence, I asked if she still thought so.
“I am used to the unfairness of the federal judicial system,” Golder wrote back in an e-mail. “The unfairness goes far beyond this case. Most people are not exposed to it to understand just how unfair the system is, but those of us who work within the system on a regular basis have been frustrated by it for many years.”
She said Ralph Pegram’s prior criminal record was similar to Augusto’s and worse for the fact he was arrested while out on bail, but he won favor for giving evidence against Saffan. Augusto didn’t do that. “Unfortunately, the federal system significantly rewards disloyalty and snitching – and I do mean significantly,” Golder said. “I have some clients who have received sentences after cooperation that are one-fourth of what they would have gotten after trial...
“The guidelines so severely punish someone for going to trial that innocent people are pleading to avoid the consequences. For example, Adam would have faced a 3-year sentence if he went to trial and lost.”
Most courtroom spectators were there to stick up for Saffan. With all seats filled, more waited in the corridor. In addition to relatives, friends and the commissioner, Heyman, the Saffan rooting section included four Florida fish and wildlife officers – three active, one former— a Hialeah police lieutenant and a former Miami-Dade County judge, all ready to say nice things about him if called upon. They were not needed for that.
Up front on Judge William Zloch’s bench stood a stack of 85 letters from those people and others, praising Saffan and describing his good deeds, all asking the judge not to lock him up.
Richard Sharpstein, a Miami lawyer who joined the defense just for the sentencing, is good at doing that all by himself. He told the judge his client was remorseful and apologetic. He reminded the judge that Saffan’s plea agreement required him to forfeit one of his boats and pay a penalty (about $50,000) equal to 125 percent of the other boat’s value.
“They’re old, they’re relics, like eyesores, but these boats are like children to him that he’s nurtured,” the lawyer said. “Giving those up is torture to him.”
The judge had read the letters about what a splendid, charitable fellow Saffan is. He interrupted Sharpstein’s leniency plea with a question that sounded like a soft pitch to an eager slugger: “With Mr. Saffan’s background, how could he stand before the court in this case?”
Sharpstein jumped on it. “This is a man who grew up working on the docks, swabbing the decks so to speak, and worked his way up,” the lawyer replied, somewhat indirectly. “He donates trees and cleans up and raises the flag at the marina.”
As for the letter writers, the crowd in the courtroom and the others standing in the hallway, “They’re astounded and amazed that he’s here,” Sharpstein went on. “Some undersized fish were caught…it’s a monetary issue and I think he regrets that.”
This was his best line: “This is a man that should be admired. This is a man that should be somehow revered, and he is, by many people.”
Nobody argued that Saffan didn’t do the crime — just that he shouldn’t have to do the time. He had pleaded guilty to two charges of harvesting undersized sailfish, of which smaller specimens are protected by the federal Lacey Act.
Unless authorized by a special permit, meant for scientific study purposes, it’s forbidden to keep any billfish shorter than 63 inches between the lower jaw and the fork of the tail. The maximum penalty is five years in prison. Federal sentencing guidelines, as applied to Saffan’s case, called for a year-and-a-half to two years.
Saffan also forfeits one of his Therapy IV boats and has to pay a $50,000 penalty based on the appraised value of the other boat. He has to pay a $35,000 fine and agreed to post a restitution fund, up to $75,000 to repay the tourists he and his men fooled.
That’s fairly stiff, but he still gets to run around loose.
All five men pleaded guilty to keeping undersized sailfish. In theory, each man could have been gaffed with a 20-year maximum sentence for fraud, 20 for the obstructions of justice and five years for conspiracy if those charges had stuck and they were convicted.
Prosecutors usually give breaks like that to crooks who plead guilty, admitting their offenses. It saves the court time and the expense of a trial. There are extra breaks for cooperation by crooks who finger their co-crooks.
This is practical, often sensible and even defensible, if not always easy to take when bad guys are slammered while worse guys celebrate freedom.
Thomas Watts-FitzGerald, lead prosecutor in the Therapy IV case, thought the judge should have given Saffan some prison time. In written motions at earlier stages of the case, the prosecutor urged the court to impose sentences that would serve as deterrents to swindling in the charter fishing business. In other words, prison terms.
“Realistically, probation simply makes wrongdoing appear as a risk cost and not truly a deterrent to others,” he wrote. From the day they were arrested, he said, Saffan and his men had alibis for their actions by claiming predatory charter operators are prevalent from Jacksonville to Key West – maybe not truly as bad as all that, but the government did have complaints and evidence that there are other charter predators.
Saffan, in his statement to the court, seemed almost surprised that the customers he cheated squawked about it: “If I made a mistake, if I embarrassed anybody, I apologize,” he said. “I tried to do right in my heart.”
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