The special agent in charge of federal fish cops in the Northwest has been removed from her position while internal government investigators pore over documents from her Seattle office, sources say.
Vicki Nomura, who has overseen law enforcement for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle for a decade, was abruptly replaced in mid-May by an official from the agency's headquarters in Silver Spring, Md.
The Fisheries Service is a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Nomura's section of the agency is a law-enforcement branch that employs 111 special agents with most of the same police powers as FBI agents.
The Fisheries Service is a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Nomura's section of the agency is a law-enforcement branch that employs 111 special agents with most of the same police powers as FBI agents.
Fisheries agents police commercial fishing and the illegal trade in fish and marine mammals, from poaching of endangered species to international smuggling of everything from whale teeth to shark fins. There are 12 special agents in Seattle.
In the last two years, the Fisheries Service's national law-enforcement program has been the subject of several scathing audits, focused primarily on leadership in its Maryland headquarters and on issues in New England, where agents were accused of bullying commercial fishermen, conducting heavy handed raids on fish markets and mismanaging an asset-forfeiture fund.
The reviews criticized agents for threatening fishermen cited for violating fishing rules with extravagant fines — sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — if the fishermen contested the citations