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was evil," recalls Hall. "Kelly's just a hoodlum, a straight-up hoodlum."
"I had been working on this for years to get to the Top Gun," says Hall. "Everything had come into place." In 1974, a procession of agent cars and a spotter plane - one agent called it a "circus" - traced a certain station wagon up the Interstate toward New York.. When the driver reached a warehouse in Elizabeth, New Jersey, agents moved in. They found a huge shipment of skins spread out around Klapisch and Kelly.
Klapisch and Kelly each received suspended sentences and $9,500 in fines. But the lesson didn't work. Eighteen months later, the poachers were caught again. This time, they pulled out of the business.
With the major poachers gone by 1977, Louisiana's alligator population recovered, and Hall went to bat for a legal season. All along he had been preaching to the poachers that their best hope was to obey the law and let gators thrive. He was right. Louisiana now has so-many gators that the state allots a number to be hunted legally every September.
Hall's bulldog determination to rescue the alligator from oblivion and protect the region's wildlife earned him the Louisiana Wildlife Federation's Conservationist of the Year award-three times. U.S. magistrate Michaelle Wynne in Louisiana calls him "one of the best things to hit this country. He was the beginning of wildlife enforcement in Louisiana."
Hall's next major undercover caper began in 1980 when Soviets complained to U.S. authorities about thousands of headless Alaskan walrus decorating Siberian beaches. The walrus had been killed for one reason - ivory. The FWS response was to patrol the Alaskan coast. Hall's response was. "What the hell good is that going to do?" When challenged to come up with a better idea, he did.
Hall's first step was to take on a partner, William Vaughn Doak, sometime actor and former owner of a nightclub with "semi-nude dancing," ex-skinflick maker and currently owner of a shop in New Orleans called "Endangered Species." Doak sold only animal artifacts that could be legally traded, and his shop was loaded with antique ivory pieces. He taught Hall what they hoped would be enough to make him convincing, and Hall transformed into Dave Hayes, Texas oil man and aspiring ivory merchant.
"I always tried to go after the big fish more than the little bitty ones," says Hall. This fish was Charles McAlpine, the biggest ivory dealer in the country, who happened to live in Washington, conveniently close to his market in Alaska.
Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, native peoples are allowed to hunt walrus and sell ivory carvings. However, selling raw ivory to a nonnative is a federal offense. McAlpine deftly solved this problem by using natives to do his buying and transporting for him. As one native bragged to Hall, "I could take that ivory and drag it around on a string in front of God and everybody, and there ain't nothing they could do to me."
With the shop as their cover, Doak and Mall began buying big time from McAlpine. The two eventually went on spending sprees in Alaska, spreading their net over smaller dealers. Hall had no problem finding quarry. "Everyone was beating down our door, from bartenders to taxi drivers."
Among the more interesting characters they investigated were Jerry Kingery and Douglas O'Neill. Kingery, a former Hell's Angel who had formed his own bikers group in Anchorage called the Brothers, used a human skull-he claimed it was his ex-girlfriend's-as a table decoration. O'Neill was a former biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game. Wealthy and paranoid, he hired a detective to go to New Orleans and check out this "Dave Hayes." The cover held.
In February 1982, FWS agents closed the net. Coordinated raids in Anchorage, Nome. Seattle, Hawaii, San Francisco and New Jersey produced 100 arrests and 10,000 pounds of illegal ivory. Hall smiles at the memory: "We showed them how the cow ate the cabbage."
Hall received a letter from the FWS deputy director saying the case would go down in the annals of wildlife enforcement. Nothing could ever match it again. But as much as Hall has been praised, he's also been criticized for his arrogance and ego. One fellow agent calls him "the type of guy that if you're out on a raid, will leap from the helicopter when it's 15 feel up in the air to be the first one charging through the door." Adam O'Hara, head of FWS Special Operations, simply states, "He is a man possessed."
But one man alone can't protect America's wildlife. With a high-rolling international market for rare animals, poachers have many ways to make fortunes. Yet FWS fields only 204 agents to fight this well-equipped enemy. Lack of federal funds ties many agents to their desks for six months of the year. "There are some days I think I'd take the odds that Custer had," says agent Terry Grosz.
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