Dead Fish Tell No Tales: Part 2 | 3

Steve here, and a real quick catch-up from our last episode.

Here's what you need to remember.

We got weights and fits!

There we go!

What the fuck?

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

I'm Steve Buscemi, and you're listening to Big Time,

an Apple original podcast from Piece of Work Entertainment

and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions.

Today, Sean Flynn and Louise Jarvis Flynn are back to finish our tale. September 30th, 2022.
Cleveland, Ohio. A gorgeous fall day on the shore of Lake Erie.
Dozens of people are gathered in a park for the end of the Lake Erie Walleye Trail Championship. They're restless, agitated, because the winning catch, Chase Kaminsky and Jacob Runyon's five walleye, well, those fish don't look right.
I knew that there was something wrong. That's Jason Fisher.
He runs the tournament. He's inspecting those suspicious fish.
He has his hands on one, and he feels something hard inside. I'm like, oh my God.
There's typically not hard objects in the belly of a fish. I mean, they're not eating, you know, zebra mussels or, you know, rocks or whatever, turtles.

By now, everybody has their phone out.

Recording.

Jason cuts open the belly of the walleye. We got weights and shocked because a lot of people already suspect Chase and Jake are cheaters.
And yet everybody is shocked because, holy hell, they stuffed a fish full of lead. So that's how they did it.
Total chaos. It goes on for a while.
All these motherfucking years. Go get that motherfucker.
Why you like it now? On the scale, those fish weigh almost 34 pounds.

Disemboweled, it's closer to 25 pounds.

Inside the five total fish are seven pounds of lead and almost a pound of walleye fillets,

which keep the lead weights from clanking around.

It's a clever touch. Clanking would totally give it away.

Everybody's recording the outrage and zooming in on the weights and the sad autopsy fish and zooming out to capture the bedlam. Jake is all by himself.
Chase ran. He literally ran to his truck.
I was running after him. It reminded me of a little teenage boy running to soccer practice.
It's what he looked like. Yeah, he just went and hid in his truck.
That's Mike Miller, a veteran of the Lake Erie Walleye tournaments. He's been suspicious of Chase and Jake since the previous season.
Obviously, there was an angry mob. He let Jake ride the whole thing out.
Jason did his best to keep Jake from getting pummeled. I don't want anybody to touch these guys.
I want to go. He didn't run away.
He didn't put a hoodie over his face and take off. He legitimately just stood there and took the wrath of the crowd.
There was so much wrath. Yeah, a lot of wrath.
A lot of wrath. You know the irony? They only needed 17 pounds of fish to win.
They didn't need to cheat. About 100 miles to the west, in tiny Rossford, Ohio, Mayor Neal was not closely following the late-season walleye tournaments.
It just, this will sound bad, it wasn't a priority for me. I was already looking towards next year's tournament, how to make that bigger and better and to promote our city.
Then, my son's a big barstool sports guy and he goes, dad, you're national. Like, what are you talking about? You're on barstool sports.
I go, I haven't played high school football since 1986. And he goes, no, those guys in Cleveland, the cheating and all that stuff.
And then I just, I watched the circus. I saw the YouTube videos and everything else.
It's a story that made national headlines. There are scandals in professional fishing? It turns out, yes.
At a fishing tournament in Cleveland on Friday, a duo that had been declared winners were caught cheating. Allegedly having put lead weights inside the fish they just caught.
A suspicious judge cuts open the fish and pulls out weight after weight. Mayor Neal did not, at first, recognize the names or the faces.
You gotta remember, everybody shows up with a baseball hat, bib overalls, dark sunglasses, and they're holding up fish. But it didn't take long to make the connection.
Those same two guys, Chase and Jake, had won the Rossford Walleye Roundup back in April. And they'd been accused of cheating, which meant that in the Rossford Walleye Roundup record books, there appeared to be a pretty big asterisk next to 2022.
I was bothered and hurt by what I thought would be the assault on the integrity of our walleye tournament. Then we really started from scratch.
It hit me like a ton of bricks. Because at the time, I thought it was so bizarre, they wouldn't donate their fish.
And then fast forward to that, when they got caught, I'm like, I know why they didn't donate their fish. We got weights and fish! There we go! Okay, pause.
I have questions. So many questions.
No, I mean a fundamental question. The cliche is all fishermen are liars, right? I mean, the internet knows this, and yet that went viral.
Like, it was a shock to people. Well, because it is.
It's one thing to lie when there's nothing at stake. Every fisherman's got a story about the big one that got away, and ain't no way, no how anyone can prove him wrong.
But here, the evidence just tumbled out in the most damning and humiliating and undeniable way possible. At this level of fishing, there's actually quite a bit at stake.
The day they got caught, Chase and Jake were about to walk away with more than $28,000 in prize money. We're not talking about weekend tournament where you win 600 bucks.
These tournaments that he was winning, I think in a year and a half, him and Jake were like over $300,000. Mike Miller again.
There's nowhere in the rules that say, if you get caught cheating, you do 30 days in jail, or it's a $20,000 fine. Just says the tournament director has his discretion to disqualify or deny entry to anybody that they want.
To a criminal, I think it was a no-brainer. For a small-time crook, competitive fishing is a pretty good mark.
Low risk, high reward. Unless somebody cuts your fish open, and then there's proof, heavy lead proof that you cheated to win $28,000, which is actually stealing.
So a lot of tournaments hire people like Stan Fulmer, a polygraph examiner. People have to pay money to enter these tournaments.
So if somebody cheats and wins a tournament by cheating, they have cheated all those individuals that entered. And once people cheat in tournaments, they don't want to come back and join that tournament again.
And the tournament itself will dwindle and fall away. Stan's been a polygraph examiner for 44 years.
I do tests pre-employment for police and sheriff's departments. I also do criminal cases for police and sheriff's departments.
But I'm also the examiner for the Federal Defender's Office. So we do a lot of tests for the defense.
We do tests on relationships, family relationships, family conflicts, business losses. He's been told pretty much every kind of lie by every kind of liar.
I've done tests on people that have cut people's heads off. And when he's not doing that, he's testing people who win fishing tournaments.
In all kinds of ways, various ways to achieve a fishing tournament. We have caught people putting ice, stuffing ice.
They stuffed a water hose in a giant big old fish one time and filled it up with about 100 pounds of water. When you're getting in a fish, you know, up to 500, 600,000 pounds, they could do that.
People have been known to hide fish, to catch big ones ahead of time and keep them in a trap under a dock or near a secluded bank, so they can grab them when no one's looking. You could have friends out fishing too, buddies who aren't officially in the tournament, but who'll bring you any big ones they reel in.
The thing about fishing tournaments, they happen on open water. Lake Erie is the smallest of the Great Lakes, but it may as well be an ocean.
It's not hard to slip out of view. We've had people in the larger tournaments that might pay $20,000, $30,000, $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 actually catching fish maybe in another state and even flying them in by float plane and landing in the ocean.
So people are constantly coming up with new ideas how to do things. I caught up with Stan at a redfish tournament, Redfish Madness, in North Carolina, right after he'd polygraphed the winners, who were not, for the record, suspected of cheating.
It's just protocol. This is my easy day.
Nobody here generally wants to kill me after the test, or shoot me, or come after me in some way. Hiring a polygraph examiner like Stan is not uncommon in the big money tournaments or even the medium money ones.
Knowing there will be a polygraph at the end is both a deterrent and an assurance. People who don't win want to believe that those who did, did so honestly.
The whole point of polygraph, we don't look at it as trying to catch people. We do catch people.
But the point is to keep a tournament clean. Once you confront a person, they could just decide they had a nice, fun day of fishing and really didn't want to win anything.
They were just there to have a happy time and go home. But not everyone.
Well, some of them think they can beat the test. It's one thing to cheat.
Now you're coming in and taking the test, you're taking it to a step level. Now you're trying to beat the system.
You're really trying to get away with it. So that makes it even tougher.
So when we catch them in that type of thing, and they've gone to all this effort to do that, that's when you don't want to have a mercy on their soul. Well, there's not a lot of room for mercy.

You can't get arrested for failing a fishing tournament polygraph.

But you will get disqualified and ostracized.

But wait, why didn't Chase and Jake take any tests?

They did, but not all tests are equal.

A lot of tournaments use what's called a voice stress analysis to see if anyone cheated.

But a voice stress test is pretty much worthless.

A study by the National Institute of Justice found that they're no more reliable than a coin toss.

Heads you're lying, tails you're not, not hard to beat.

Polygraphs, like the one Stan administers, are much more reliable.

And we know that Chase and Jake failed at least one of those.

Remember at the end of the 2021 season, when they won the big fall brawl,

and soon after that they were mysteriously disqualified?

At first, nobody knew why. But then it came out that one of them, either Chase or Jake, failed the polygraph.
But that hadn't been enough to stop them. Failing a polygraph is not a crime.
In the context of the tournaments, that would merely suggest that you had cheated. It wouldn't prove anything.
But actual lead weights tumbling out of your fish, that's different. That's proof that you cheated.
And if you cheated to fraudulently obtain $28,000 in prize money, that's a crime. It's called attempted grand theft.
And in Ohio, and most other places, it's a felony. Not a rules violation, though I suppose it's that too, but a real crime.
And when there are viral videos of the shenanigans, the authorities, like, say, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office, they're going to notice. Fishing is all fun and games until someone's charged with felonies, which both Chase and Jake were.
Two weeks after those walleye were gutted, A Cuyahoga County grand jury indebted Chase and Jake on four charges each. One was a misdemeanor, and kind of a weird one, unlawful ownership of wild animals.
It's perfectly legal to catch a walleye and kill it and eat it, but you're not allowed to stuff pieces of it into another walleye to keep your cheating weights from clanking together. That apparently is an impermissible use of your dead fish.
In legalese, unlawful ownership of wild animals. The other three charges were felonies.
One was cheating. Really, there's a crime called cheating.
And there was attempted grand theft. And finally, the coup de grace, possessing criminal tools.
That's Chase's very expensive vote. In the spring of 2023, Chase and Jake sat behind a defendant's table in a wood-paneled courtroom in Cleveland.
They wore matching gray suits with black dress shirts. Prosecutors played a selection of those viral videos on a screen up front.
There's stuffed fish being sliced, close-ups of the weights, a whole bunch of angry

people yelling at Jake. In the courtroom, Jake mostly stared straight ahead with a hangdog look on his face.
Chase seemed more alert, more tuned in. They were there to be sentenced.
A few months earlier, in March 2023, Jake and Chase had both pleaded guilty to two charges, cheating and illegal possession of wildlife. The other two, attempted theft and possession of criminal tools, were dismissed.
But they still had to forfeit the boat. Here's prosecutor Andrew Rogalski explaining why to the judge.
It wasn't just that that was a boat that was won improperly or fraudulently. The boat itself was an instrumentality.
When the law enforcement officers executed a warrant and seized that boat, they found a compartment that literally smelled fishy and was sort of customized to have a secret compartment that would have enabled these defendants to conceal, whether it be fish that they caught the day before, or the lead weights that would allow them to potentially pass a boat inspection. You have photographs of that? I do have photographs of that.
A secret compartment. A hidey hole.
That doesn't sound like something you'd use only once. Here's the prosecutor again.
As you can see pretty clearly from those videos, Judge, nobody believes that that day at Gordon Park was the person that Chase Kaminsky or Jacob Runyon cheated. It confirmed suspicions and it led to an outlet of rage.
But we're here in a court of law and Chase Kaminsky and Jacob Runyon can only be prosecuted when we have evidence that we can bring in a court of law. Jason Fisher, the walleye tournament director, he had a few things he wanted to tell the judge before he passed sentence.
First of all, I wanted to thank you and the prosecution and the Division of Wildlife for handling this matter seriously. It means a lot to us, and not that you wouldn't, but at the end of the day, it is complaint generated by fishing.
So we appreciate you guys taking the time to investigate properly. That was nice, to acknowledge that.
For all the attention that Chase and Jake's shenanigans generated, it was usually sort of a giggle in the background. But to folks involved, this was seriously unsettling.
The emotion you hear in those videos, that's not people reacting to anonymous grifters, some faceless burglars. This was personal, and it wasn't just about the money.
Something to be said is in that Rossford tournament, the guy who took second place, he was a very seasoned and long-time, very well-respected angler. Mike Miller, Lake Erie Walleye Tournament veteran.
He's at the tail end of his career. That was the last tournament he ever fished.
So he could have went out as a champion, but he's second place. And then there was another tournament that Chase and Jake won where a father-son team came in second place.
So it's like not only the monetary value of what they're stealing from people, they're also stealing people's hopes and dreams and fantasies and lifelong memories that you have with somebody. Where's the value on that? Ten days in jail and $2,500 in fines, apparently.
That's the sentence the judge handed both. He also gave them 18 months probation and took away their fishing licenses for three years.
Before they were led away, both men apologized, said they were super embarrassed and very sorry for whatever that's worth. Meh, it's not worth much.
This might have been Jake's first major run-up to law, but this wasn't the first time Chase had been charged with a crime. For him, it was small-time stuff.
Trespassing, theft, all misdemeanors. Plus, in 2013, he pleaded guilty to tattooing a minor.
And in February, just months after he'd done that super embarrassing thing with the fish, he was arrested with his son for passing fake $100 bills at a bowling alley.

Not counterfeits, fakes.

Prop money.

For movies.

Says so right on the front.

For motion picture purposes, not legal tender.

Chase's son pled guilty

and was sentenced to a year of probation.

And Chase pled no contest

and was sentenced to six months to a year behind bars. Alessio.
I had to write it down earlier. Perfect.
You guys have fished 37 lood events. I got your name right for the first time.
Good job. Good job, guys.
25-12. 25-12.
Nice work. The Lake Erie Walleye Trail, Jason's tournament series, rebounded from the scandal just fine.
Those of you youngsters in the crowd, we got free fishing poles and free shirts courtesy of the NPAA over there. So take yourself home a fishing pole.
We want to see you guys out there next time. Coming up to the scales, we got Lenny guys.
This is Jason's fourth tournament of 2023. It's in Ashtabula, Ohio.
Coincidentally, Jake's hometown. He's not here.
Since this has happened, it's been a fantastic year of fishing in these tournaments. Here's Mike Miller again.
The atmosphere is the way it should be. It's back to the way it used to be.
There's high fives, there's attaboys, there's a lot of people congratulating. There's guys who are winning tournaments that have never won before.
And it's just a much more positive atmosphere. Nobody's going home on Sunday and calling each other, wondering and complaining about Chase and Jake cheating anymore.
It's the way it should be. That wasn't the sentiment everywhere.
Not in Rossford, for sure. You know, that kind of just knocked us all down.
That's Mayor Neal in Rossford. When this story went viral, global, there was a picture that often went with it.
It's of Chase and Jake at the 2022 Rossford Walleye Roundup. Jake is holding up a big wrestling-style championship belt.
Chase is on one side with one of those giant novelty checks. On Jake's other side, smiling, almost beaming, is Mayor Neal.
Mayor Neal, a public servant who only wanted to make the best damn walleye tournament in the universe, he certainly didn't deserve any of this. To be very clear, Rossford got rolled by Chase and Jake, just like everyone else.
But when it's your picture in the New York Times, well, the 2023 Walleye Roundup was canceled. We decided to pause.
We just thought that we need to get better. We need to figure this out.
Chase and Jake gave walleye fishing such a black eye, the Roundup's main sponsor, Bass Pro Shop, pulled out. Mayor Neal says it was a mutual decision.
But this, he hopes, is only a bump, a temporary stumble. We want credibility, whatever that looks like.
You know, so if we need to put more things in place, then we'll do that. Of course they will.
When you're a small town with big dreams, you don't just give up. You stay focused on the dream.
I just thought it was genius and brilliant that being the only municipality in all Northwest Ohio that has a Bass Pro, being on the Maumee River, which is the largest walleye run in the entire country, being eight miles from Lake Erie, which is the walleye capital of the world, that we had finally found a niche. We had found something that separated us from everybody else.
Our dream was, and it still is, and we're going to go after it, is to make this the largest and best and most popular and famous walleye fishing tournament on planet Earth. Next week on Big Time, a very sick scheme.

This has been Big Time, an Apple original podcast produced by Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. It's hosted by me, Steve Buscemi.
This episode was reported and produced by Sean Flynn and Louise Jarvis Flynn. Our story editor is Audrey Quinn.
Lane Rose is our showrunner and managing producer. Our production team includes Amy Padula, Rajiv Gola, Morgan Jaffe, and associate producer Dania Abdelhamid.
Fact-checking by Gray Lanza. Sound design and mixing by Shawnee Aviram.
Our theme was written by Nicholas Principe and Peter Silberman of Spatial Relations. Production help from Matt Rand.

Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher.

Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Thanks for listening.