The way it was spun was that the recreational crabbing community is SOOO bad that it threatens the resource and the Commission wants to reward them in the face of their bad behavior???

The group that Deputy Chief Cenci described had caught tens of thousands of pounds of crab illegally in 2E (MA 8-1 and 8-2). This was a huge illegal COMMERCIAL operation which LE caught up with by inspecting sales outlets and then tracking their product back through the system - too much crab for the supporting paperwork. Apparently that caused someone to spill enough of the beans to put LE onto the illegal harvesters. Someone had to be purchasing this stuff at a cut rate to get it into the supply line.

Again, although several commercials spoke to having direct knowledge of alleged illegal catches by recreational crabbers to include the one guy who also had a sales outlet and was asked if he wanted to buy a cooler of crab NONE of those folks continued their stories by saying they had called LE to report it. Kind of like fish stories without pictures......