TRANSCRIPT: KAREN HOPKINS. Five audio files, approximately 84 minutes. Karen Hopkins: So you going to get a recording contract out of this?

Transcription

1 TRANSCRIPT: KAREN HOPKINS Interviewee: Interviewer: Karen Hopkins Andy Horowitz Date: July 13, 2010 Location: Length: Grand Isle, LA Five audio files, approximately 84 minutes START OF INTERVIEW [00:00 to 00:20 not transcribed] Karen Hopkins: So you going to get a recording contract out of this? Drew Landry: I don t know. KH: You going to be a--. DL: I might be able to eat some lunch. KH: You going to be a rock star? AH: You don t need to eat lunch. You already ate all her food out of her office [00:29]. KH: Are you hungry? You hungry? DL: I m all right. KH: Baby, fix him one of them pulled pork sandwiches. Ricky: [00:38] [Laughter] KH: You want one too? Homemade-- DL: Yeah, no, we re going to go buy lunch somewhere. KH: --pulled pork sandwich.

2 Karen Hopkins 2 AH: I will eat it. I mean I feel bad that I came in here for you to do me a favor and now you re going to make me lunch but I will eat it. Ricky: Well I ve eaten my fill of them. KH: This is a Cajun--. This is a homebaked Cajun roast pork. AH: Okay. KH: Now wait,-- AH: You already got me. KH: --and then it is going to be covered in Florida Cracker-style barbecue sauce, which is called blue front barbecue sauce, and then it will be covered in Cajun homemade cole slaw on a bun. AH: Did you invent that? KH: No. Ricky: Have you ever had a barbecue pulled pork sandwich with the cole slaw on the top? AH: I ve seen it. Ricky: Yeah. KH: This, it s amazing. AH: [01:30] North Carolina [01:32]. DL: Can I get that without the cole slaw? Ricky: What? [01:34]: He sounds like me. [Laughs] DL: I don t do mayonnaise, dude. I just don t do it. KH: Okay. You can have a slawless one.

3 Karen Hopkins 3 Ricky: It s unbelievable. I had my first--. DL: I know it s sacrilege, but--. KH: You never had cole slaw before, or you don t like it? DL: I don t like mayonnaise. [Break in recording] KH: --sells his fish to Dean. AH: Okay. KH: So when we first met he had--. He was in a relationship with an undesirable and I was in a relationship with an undesirable, so we were just like, okay, well, work together. That was it. Then when he came back, because he only comes back yearly, when he came back his undesirable had been swept to the curb and I had kicked mine to the curb so it s like he would hint occasionally, When we going to lunch? and I m thinking, this guy s younger than me and I don t want to ask this guy out and he s going to be like if I tell that old bitch no she s going to mess up my fish tickets. You know what I mean? [Laughs] I didn t want to put him in that position. But he kept hinting. Like one day he said--. We were at the Conoco. He was there getting gas and I went to get lunch and he said, Hey! What s for lunch? so I said, that s it, and I asked him, I said--. Well I didn t have his number. I had to call his friend and his friend told him to call me at the office, and he called and I said, What you doing tonight? Nothing. I said, You want to go to dinner? Yep, and that was it. That was--. Ricky: I didn t ask where or when or what time. KH: No hesitation. That was March--. AH: [Laughs] I ll be there. I ll be everywhere [01:27]. KH: That was September 9, 2006, right, baby?

4 Karen Hopkins 4 [01:32]: 2005, I thought. Ricky: No, 06. KH: 2006, and then in April--. When did you get here this time, April of 09? Ricky: March. KH: In March of 09 he moved here permanently because the fishing s better. He bought a reef fish permit. Ricky: Well when I met her my house was being built over there. KH: Yeah. [Laughs] AH: It s in Florida? Ricky: Yeah, brand new house. It took me about six months to get the permits because back then there was a big boom in housing, back in 05 and 06, so I put the money down in 05 and it was supposed to be ready in October of 06. So I came over here to fish in July of 06, her and I got together on the 9 th of September, the season was over on about the 5 th of October, I jumped in my boat, took off back to Florida and moved into my brand new home that just got finished, and I haven t seen too much of that house since [02:31]. AH: [Laughs] I bet not. Ricky: It s been bordered up with the aluminum hurricane shutters pretty much ever since. KH: We spent a lot of-- Ricky: [02:38 I went home] to go fish. KH: --money on airline tickets.

5 Karen Hopkins 5 Ricky: When did I go home-- 06, 07, 08 to fish, and I didn t go home last year in 09. KH: Yeah. We spent a lot of money on airplane tickets, but he moved here permanently to fish for mackerel and he got a reef fish permit. He bought a reef fish permit and before he could actually get any--. Well, what, you got maybe three or four trips in? Ricky: I think two? KH: The oil spill happened. AH: All right, well let s start this in the beginning. Let s do this all properly. Okay so all that means is I need you to say your name. KH: My name is Karen Hopkins. AH: And maybe for the tape can you say where we re sitting right now? KH: We re sitting in my house at 195 Cypress Lane, Grand Isle, Louisiana. AH: And if you don t mind me asking your birth date? KH: 5/26/60, and this is the owner here, hang on. AH: Okay. KH: Hey. [Break in recording] AH: So where are you from? KH: I was born in Pecaniere, Louisiana. AH: Now where is that? KH: That s about six miles from Arnaudville, Louisiana, about twenty-five miles from Lafayette, Louisiana. It s right smack dab in the middle of the country. Ricky: They got a Mardi Gras.

6 Karen Hopkins 6 KH: We got a good Mardi Gras over there. We got a real Mardi Gras over there. DL: My buddy said he went out there with a--. He had a pretty nice [00:29] camera. He said, Dude, they thought I was with CNN. They gave me all the good pictures. KH: Yeah, yeah, it s great. AH: My fiancee and I are supposed to be married in Arnaudville but the place just burned yesterday. KH: Noonie s. AH: Yeah. You know that place? KH: Yeah, my brother-in-law, he cooked there. AH: George? George Marks? KH: No, no. His name is Donald Thibodeaux. He quit cooking at Noonie s a while back and then went to work cooking for my brother who owns a little restaurant in Lafayette. It s called Pop s Black Pot. AH: I ve been there. KH: That s my brother who owns that. AH: Oh, really? KH: Mm hmm. AH: That s great. I m from Connecticut but I lived in Lafayette for a little while and my fiancee s from there. KH: Small world. AH: Really. So you grew up there. Was your family from there for awhile?

7 Karen Hopkins 7 KH: Yeah, my family--. My mom was born in Ville Platte, Louisiana, and my dad was born in Pecaniere, Louisiana, and so were his parents. His grandfather before him came from Germany and bought the property. My maiden name is Mayer, M-a-y-er, and so we have a Mayer and we have a Deville. AH: Can you tell me a little bit about growing up out there and what kind of work your parents did? KH: Well my mom was a stay-at-home mom. She had four kids. My dad was in the glass business. He started the Dixie Glass chain with Randolph McCormick and he also raised cattle on ninety acres of family land that my grandmother still lived on. When I was a kid there was no place to ride bikes or--. It wasn t that kind of childhood. We would go and help my grandmother every evening with her chickens and her gardens and Dad would go feed the cows and he d ride through to make sure that they were all okay. We had a pecan orchard right behind our house and we d go help. We d pick pecans. We scratched the ground for a lot of years for pecans. We had a free childhood. AH: What do you mean by that? KH: We didn t have the worries--. We didn t have like the skating rings and we didn t have any--. We didn t have any temptations, I mean video arcades, like a child that would be my age would grow up in a big city and they would have all of these different places to go and spend time, so we had to learn how to make our fun. We spent a lot of time outside and climbing in the barns and running through the bean fields, just the simple stuff. Bicycles, I mean we knew how to ride bikes but the first time I really had a bicycle was when I was probably about ten and my mom and dad had bought a camper and so we could ride the bikes in the campgrounds. It was great. If my daddy

8 Karen Hopkins 8 wasn t home by 5:30 in the evening something bad was wrong. My mom and dad had a wonderful marriage and we never had to listen to them argue and there was never that--. If they had a problem with each other I don t know when they ever dealt with it because we didn t know about it. AH: Did you have other family around in the area? KH: Oh, yeah. AH: Your grandmother was there. KH: My grandmother on my dad s side was there and when she died she had six children, she had a hundred twenty grandchildren, and like two hundred thirty great grandchildren, and one great, great grandchild, and she was something like eighty-two years old. AH: Do you think she knew everybody s name? KH: Oh, she did. She did, yeah. Her name was [05:04], and then she married John Mayer. She lived right there with us. My cousins--. I mean every January 1 we d have a huge family reunion and we would have to rent the Happy Landing Club in Pecaniere. Drew, you know where the Happy Landing Club is? Well it s right on Highway 741, right in Pecaniere. You know where J.C. s is? You know where the Silver Slipper is? DL: Yeah. KH: Okay. If you re heading toward Port Barre on 741 and you re going to see maybe a mile down the road on your left is J.C. s. Happy Landing s on the right. It s on the corner of Old School Road and 741. Well we would rent that and there was overflow. It was such a huge family. So, on my dad s side we had an enormous family. On my

9 Karen Hopkins 9 mom s side it was my grandmother. Her name was [06:14] Fontenot Deville and she only had three children and seven grandchildren. AH: So did you hear a lot of French growing up? KH: Yes. AH: Do you speak French? KH: When I started kindergarten I couldn t speak English very well at all, and when I started kindergarten in those days it was not a good thing to speak French. There was no such thing as CODOFIL. They wanted to beat the French out of you and they pretty much did, so I forgot a lot of the way that I should be--. You know I should be able to speak it fluently but from disuse and this--. For so many years I was scared to say words in French because I didn t know who was going to hit me next. We had a horrible teacher and she was just--. Mrs. Durio was her name and she was French but she had been programmed to not allow us to speak French at school and she did a good job of it. AH: But you still had some of those other traditions. You were just talking about the Mardi Gras. KH: Oh, yeah, chasing the chicken. Yeah, we had Mardi Gras. We had horses and still to this day in Pecaniere they ride horses and they do a traditional Mardi Gras. It s not like the New Orleans kind of deal and it never was meant to be that way. You chase the chicken, you have your gumbos. We weren t really raised in a religious family. I was raised Catholic but we didn t go to church. Mama believed that if we did our work that s the respect for God, is to live a good life and do your work and produce so others could see, and so that s what we did. We always produced by example. AH: That s a good motto.

10 Karen Hopkins 10 KH: Yeah. Like I said I had great parents. My mom died when I was twenty-four and my dad passed away in AH: So when you were growing up did you always assume that you would stay out there? KH: I did, really. I married right out of high school and I had my two daughters there. This year they ll be twenty-eight and thirty. I thought my life was there. My husband and I started a commercial glass and glazing company and we were doing very well and the marriage broke up. We used to take our clients here fishing. We had a boat here and everything and we would take our clients fishing and I loved it. Every time we came here I felt free. I felt like I could breathe. We would go home and it was like, [Sighs], so when the marriage broke up I came to Grand Isle and I never left. AH: What year was that? KH: [10:02] AH: I m distracted by how good this sandwich is. [Laughter] KH: Is it good? AH: It s perfect. KH: [Laughs] AH: It s the best sandwich I ve had in a long time. KH: Grab him a napkin, baby. It s a messy sandwich. Ricky: I know. We don t have anymore hamburger buns. AH: No, this is perfect, whatever you did. KH: [Laughs]

11 Karen Hopkins 11 AH: Really, I thank you so much. KH: Isn t it great? AH: It is so good. Ricky: Her brother-in-law put together the cole slaw and we cooked the pork roast the other night for supper and then we shredded it all. KH: Everything is homemade except the bread. But, we do have homemade blueberry cake and we do have homemade apple cinnamon bread for dessert, so we cook a lot in this house. AH: Seems like it. KH: Yeah. AH: So do you remember when you first came down to Grand Isle, when this was a place that you were coming to? KH: The first time I ever came here? AH: Yeah, the first time you were ever here. KH: I was amazed. I mean I was amazed that there was such a huge expanse of water, because we never traveled in this direction when I was a child, really. I think we came here once or twice with my dad but I was so young that I don t really--. It didn t really leave that much of an impression on me. We would always go to Holly Beach, Cameron area, because that was closer. As an adult when I first got here I fell in love with it. I fell in love with the water. We used to go fishing out here in the Gulf in our bass boat, my husband and I, and I was like addicted big time to being here and to fishing. AH: I bet you bounce around a lot, huh, in that little boat?

12 Karen Hopkins 12 KH: Oh, yeah. Yeah. People ask me, You don t get seasick? No. It s wonderful. The first time Ricky took me out fishing in his boat on the east coast of Florida it was really, really rough. He was fishing for king mackerel so it wasn t a pleasure trip. It was a work trip. I went down in the cabin because I didn t want to get in his way and I went down into the cabin and I slept the whole time, and he was amazed. His friends would radio him--on boats around us--they d radio, Your old lady sick? What s wrong? Your girlfriend sick? He said, No, she s sleeping. [Laughs] She s sleeping. [Laughs] AH: So somehow you have some natural disposition for the water. KH: Somehow, yeah, because I love it. I love it. AH: Can you describe--this is just a tape recording--can you describe what it looks like, just for someone who s never been here, what they would see if they looked out your window or out in the boat? KH: The only thing I can say is that if the person who s listening to this could close their eyes and just focus on the one word of freedom, and picture what freedom means to you. That s what they would see when they look out of my window. They would see the sun setting every evening and every evening a different color. They would see, before this happened, the fishermen coming in every night with smiles on their faces. They d come in every night with their wives waiting for them to pick them up off the boat, happy. And just a great sense of community, just the water and the air and the birds, my pelicans; this is freedom. It used to be. It used to freedom. That s what it means to me, freedom.

13 Karen Hopkins 13 AH: That s a beautiful description. Now tell me, when you came down here in KH: 98. AH: 98, excuse me, did you start working right away, or what were you going to do? KH: No, I was really--. I was just going to be. I was just going to see what direction my life was going to take, because I had been married eighteen years and I just wanted to see what direction my life was going to take. That didn t take long before I was so bored. You can only fish so much before you get sun burnt so bad that you can t get out the room anymore. I just got really so bored, and I worked--. I walked into Rome s Lounge one day and I met Claude Rome and he said, What are you going to do? I said, I don t know, Claude. I really don t know what I m going to do. Why don t you come work for me, bartend? I said, I ve never bartended before. Oh, it don t matter. You can learn. So I worked for Claude for four years, five years, and ran Rome s Lounge and I had the time of my life. AH: You must have met everybody that way. KH: I met Dean that way. The first time I ever met Dean Blanchard, the man I work for now, was at Rome s Lounge. AH: So what kind of people are down here? KH: What kind of people live here? AH: Yeah. KH: Our residents? The people who live here are some of the strongest, and I m talking not physically strong but emotionally, and determined. These are the most

14 Karen Hopkins 14 determined people. They re independent. They want to be left alone. They want as little government involvement. They don t want any regulations. They want to be able to fish and shrimp and play and love their families and fight against the storms and rebuild and do it all over again. AH: Can you tell me about those storms? If you were here in 98 you ve seen a couple already. KH: Actually I was here--. I m sorry. It was 98, yes. Yeah, I went through a lot of them. I don t remember all their names. I remember a Cindy and I remember, of course, Katrina and Rita. Katrina and Rita destroyed--. Katrina destroyed my home. I came back and I had one wall and a satellite left in my yard. My house was on the bay, about a half a mile, maybe a mile, from where we are today, and it was three feet off the ground and I had eight-foot ceilings. On the one wall that was left standing the water line with the sea grass left a mark and it was an inch below the crown molding. AH: Now people in Grand Isle know there are going to be storms. When you moved down here did you expect something like that? Is it possible to expect that something like that will ever happen to you? KH: Yeah, because where I grew up it s inland from here but it s still very close to New Iberia and it s close to the coast so Hurricane Andrew came through and at the time I still lived back home, and I saw what it did just to us. It tore down a pecan tree that was centuries old. It tore down a pecan tree that was centuries old right in my front yard. I knew what to expect and I always knew after I moved here that I was going to have to evacuate, and so--i knew. I knew. AH: What was the process like getting back on your feet?

15 Karen Hopkins 15 KH: After Katrina? Thankfully I owned a thirty-foot travel trailer and that s what we used to evacuate in. I lived in that travel trailer for about a year and a half after Katrina. AH: Did you come back here and park [18:59]? KH: I came back here and--. No, I couldn t get back there with the travel trailer. The road was so narrow and there was just so much trees and debris. I rented a little spot closer to the highway and I paid four hundred dollars a month to park my trailer in someone s driveway and I lived in there for a year and a half. AH: I m guessing it wasn t a close friend of yours? KH: No, but at that time and still to this day property owners were gouging people, gouging, and they re gouging them now. AH: So is that a distinction between the residents and other people, or is that--? KH: There are residents here who are property owners who I feel are very much gouging other residents who are less fortunate than they are, and it s driving up the property values so quickly that there are so few people who can afford to live here anymore, and that s why I live in this house. After I got out my travel trailer I had to wait that long to get an available apartment to live in. I got an apartment and it was pretty much a dive, a dump, and I was paying nine hundred dollars a month rent, which now is cheap. It s cheap. After a couple years of that I told my boss, I said, look, I got to leave. I got to find another job. I can t afford to live here. AH: Had it ever occurred to you in the first place that maybe you wouldn t come back after all that had happened?

16 Karen Hopkins 16 KH: No. It occurred to me in the first place that I would never rebuild here. That is one resolution I made to myself, that I ll never buy a home here again, because the heartbreak of losing everything that I couldn t take with me. My grandmother s black pots that I learned how to cook in, they were gone because I couldn t take them with me. I didn t have the room. Pictures and things that--. You only have--. We unloaded shrimp the day before Katrina hit land here because we were trying to give these shrimp boats the opportunity to make money to get to safety, so I didn t have a lot of time to pack. It was one of the most heartbreaking things that I ve ever gone through, but like with every pain with time it gets a little bit easier and duller and duller and you don t forget it but you learn how to compartmentalize it. AH: There were people gouging. Were there people helping? KH: There were a lot of people helping. The majority of the citizens here fought tooth and nail together to give and to share and to help coordinate outside help coming in. Our mayor was just incredible. He still is. We just have people here who have been here for generations and they re better equipped at helping the newcomers like me to get back on our feet. AH: What kind of thing, that they knew that you didn t know, that made them better equipped? KH: Well they knew that the mosquitoes were going to eat us alive and so they had extra rolls of screen when they came back in. They knew to have generators, extra generators for those of us who didn t. They knew to stockpile fuel for their generators. They knew about the MREs, and I had never had an MRE. AH: Did you end up with a favorite one? [Laughs]

17 Karen Hopkins 17 KH: No! AH: [Laughs] Or a least favorite one? KH: No. Like I said we re a big, big family of cooks. We cook and we love to cook. That s what we do. There s very few restaurants that I can go to that I can say this is good stuff, because I know what good food is. AH: So an MRE is not going to work. [Laughs] KH: An MRE just--. I lost a lot of weight. I ate the crackers and the M&Ms and things like that, but the food was just--. AH: How soon after you got back were you able to start fishing again or start getting [24:00]? KH: I didn t move back to Grand Isle until about six months after Katrina because I had to wait until there was a place for me to put my travel trailer. I had to actually live in Golden Meadow with my trailer for awhile and then when we got back to Grand Isle I couldn t work at the shrimp shed. I was already working for Dean by then. I started in 94 [sic]. AH: And that was right after you left []? KH: Yeah. I started with Dean and so Dean--. This whole place was devastated. There was nothing. AH: So why don t you tell me what Dean does and then what your job is for him. KH: Dean Blanchard Seaford is a commercial--. He buys shrimp and fish directly from the boats. He s a seafood dock, he s a seafood processor. We supply fuel, oil, ice, brining salt, everything that the boats need here. We typically buy between thirteen and fifteen million pounds of shrimp a year and--.

18 Karen Hopkins 18 AH: And how big does that make you? KH: That makes us the biggest in the state of Louisiana and possibly along the Gulf Coast, at what we do. There s processors who process a bigger amount of shrimp than we do but we re an unloading dock primarily and we are the biggest unloading dock that I know of, possibly along the Gulf Coast. AH: Now what is your job or are your jobs? KH: [Laughs] Okay. I was hired to answer the phones but what I do is I pay the boats for their catch. I log their catch with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. I pay the boats for their fish, red snapper, grouper, tile fish, and I log those catches with the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and NOAA because now there is a red snapper individual fishing quota program. It s federal. I collect the money that they owe us when they buy our products, fuel, ice, oil, salt. I make sure that the trucks as they leave here with shrimp are tallied up. I send the invoicing. I m kind of like Dean s unofficial lawyer. I read all of his legal paperwork and we have several lawyers on several different cases right now and they call me for advice, and it s real cool. It s really great. AH: How do you think you figured out how to read those documents? Those are complicated papers. KH: Well I have--. I went to college, and law wasn t my specialty, I didn t go for law, but I became a notary public because of our own little business that we had, our commercial glass business, and I needed to be able to notarize contracts, so I did that. I learned a lot because I read a lot and I m nosy and I do a lot of research and I dig a lot. AH: So it sounds like a typical day for you might be there is no typical day?

19 Karen Hopkins 19 KH: There is no typical day. A typical day would be about five nervous breakdowns. AH: [Laughs] Tell me what causes the average nervous breakdown. KH: The average nervous breakdown would be unloading about five hundred thousand pounds of shrimp in one day, and I work alone in the office. AH: How does that actually work? What does it mean to unload five hundred thousand, or whatever, a quarter ton of shrimp? KH: Five hundred thousand pounds of shrimp a day means that you have three trans-vac suction machines working. You have three crews in three different staging areas, unloading boats that are waiting in line, and you have three men coming in with shrimp tickets from three different boats at the same time, and you have people waiting in your office to get paid for their catch, and there s only one of you. And the phones are ringing off the hook because you have fishermen who want pricing and the phones are ringing off the hook because you have processors who are competing for your product and they re trying to jack you out of some money because they re trying to lower the price or they tell you that these shrimp weren t pretty enough, so you have to deal with them. Of course you have my boss, Dean, who is the most--during shrimp season--he is the most maniacal person I ve ever seen in my life. He is wide open twenty-four, seven. This is the love of his life. Unloading shrimp is just the biggest adrenaline rush for him and everything has to be perfect. He wants his fishermen happy, he wants his suppliers happy, and he wants me to do it all because somewhere along the line I messed up and showed him that I could. That s a typical nervous breakdown day.

20 Karen Hopkins 20 An atypical nervous breakdown day would be when I m in the middle of May season or August season doing all this and we have a legal problem come up and we have lawyers calling me and I need to get discovery evidence ready to submit to them and--. AH: What kind of legal problem would come up in your business? KH: Well a while back--. There s a Byrd Amendment. I don t know if you ve ever heard of the Byrd Amendment. It s also called the Continued Dumping Subsidy Offset Act, CDSOA. Robert Byrd, who recently passed away, he was the author of the Byrd Amendment, and what that was all about was it prevents--. It levels the playing field when you have an outside, a foreign company, flooding a domestic market with a product at a cheaper price. In other words if China comes in and floods our domestic market with recliners then our domestic manufacturers have a recourse through the CDSOA to tariff, for the government to charge a tariff to the people from China, and it gives them some recompense to level the playing field. We challenged the International Trade Commission on the point of the CDSOA for the shrimp because our government allowed China, Ecuador, Vietnam, they allowed these countries to come in and flood our domestic market with an inferior pond-raised shrimp, aquaculture, and we proved that there were unsafe ingredients being used in these ponds. They were antibiotic laden. European companies refused to allow them into their markets but somehow they got into our American market and the price of our domestic product plummeted. AH: When was this? KH: This started in In 2005 I filed the first CDSOA application on behalf of Dean Blanchard Seafood and I think in early 2007 or late 2006 Dean got a check from

21 Karen Hopkins 21 U.S. Customs and Border Protection for like a million, two, one million, two hundred thousand, for that CDSOA application. AH: And did that make you whole? KH: No. Well it helped, because what a lot of people don t understand is this money doesn t come from the federal government. This money is generated from tariffs that importers have to pay to get their product into our market. So he got that check and six months later they sent him a letter demanding the money back because he was not considered an affected domestic producer. He s been in the seafood business for twentyseven years. AH: So they want him out on a boat to make him an affected--? KH: No. AH: What was wrong with his status? KH: What we believe was the problem is we believe that it was politically motivated because Dean was the treasurer of the Louisiana Shrimp Association and there was another shrimp association called Southern Shrimp Alliance and Dean spoke out against Southern Shrimp Alliance s legal--. The journalist at the time called it legalized extortion of the some of the import countries, in fact some Vietnam countries. What Southern Shrimp Alliance did was acting on behalf of their membership, not the whole of the CDSOA claim but their membership, they approached or were approached by a foreign company to petition the International Trade Commission to lower their tariff and in exchange for SSA s petitioning the ITC, SSA collected eighteen million dollars and put it in their bank account. AH: And one point two of that came out of [04:46].

22 Karen Hopkins 22 KH: That eighteen million that they took should have been put into the CDSOA fund to be distributed to the fishermen, to the processors, to the dock owners, but it wasn t. It was put into SSA s bank account and it created a war chest for them. When we discovered that this was going on we exposed it and there was a huge outcry. At the time the Wall Street Journal termed it legalized extortion and within two weeks after we exposed Southern Shrimp Alliance s eighteen million dollar war chest Customs and Border Protection challenged Dean as an affected domestic producer. This has been going on for four years now, I believe, and we ve won the case against them as far as the affected domestic producer status. The ITC ruled against Customs and in our favor, stating that Customs never even had the authority to question Dean s status as an affected domestic producer because he was deemed that way by the ITC in the beginning, but they re still demanding the money back. AH: And have you returned the money? KH: No, no. After we won that portion then Customs came at us challenging our numbers, wanting to do an audit of our accounting numbers, and they re the government. We have to follow all the procedures before we have legal recourse against them. We met in Indianapolis, Indiana, we spent about fifty thousand dollars with our attorneys reconstructing our books; because Katrina hit and destroyed everything we had so we had to go back through bank statements that we had to get from the bank. We had to reconstruct everything, and we did, into a three hundred and thirty-two page book where we proved one hundred seven percent of our claim, and we submitted it. Two years later they sent us a letter telling us that our electricity is not approved as an expense. How

23 Karen Hopkins 23 does electricity apply? So to this day right now it s still unresolved and we re three hundred thousand dollars in legal fees. AH: And this is with Customs? KH: Customs and Border Protection. We ve petitioned our Congressman, our Senators, and they re helping us, and it s at the point now where Congressman Charlie Melancon and Senator David Vitter are working together on trying to get a congressional hearing on this. They are working together on our behalf to try to do a congressional hearing on this because it s egregious. AH: Now tell me how the tariff affects your average fisherman or shrimper here? KH: Well when I started a 1620 account, 1620 shrimp was probably three dollars and fifty cents a pound. When the market started getting flooded by this garbage and the American citizenry didn t realize that they were eating poison or they were eating crap because it was mis--. They thought it was just an American product that was frozen. Well the prices plummeted. They re like, oh, I can go to WalMart and get 1620s out of the freezer for a dollar fifty-two a pound. So the processor started realizing that they could make more money by processing this imported stuff and told the American fisherman, look, this is what we re paying. Take it or leave it. So when our fishermen became eligible for the CDSOA funds I mean it was miraculous to them because they had money now to buy better equipment, more fuel efficient equipment. It helped them to afford insurance payments on their boats. It helped to level the playing field. But the problem is we have Customs and Border Protection who are refusing to actually throw their weight, their full power, behind enforcing the collection of these tariffs. AH: Why is that?

24 Karen Hopkins 24 KH: To this day there are billions of dollars in tariffs that remain uncollected and when they re not uncollected they re not distributed. AH: Do you know why? KH: I have no idea. I mean I know the FDA claims that they don t have the manpower it takes to inspect every container of imported seafood that comes into this country, yet they do have the manpower to tell us that they re going to appoint a seafood sniffer to sit at every seafood dock along the Gulf Coast to smell the seafood to make sure it doesn t have oil in it. We re talking about a person that they ve trained for three days in Michigan, Battle Creek, Michigan, and this person after three days is supposed to be knowledgeable enough to tell us if our seafood is safe when we ve been doing this all our lives. AH: How many people in Grand Isle are in the fishing and shrimping industry? How many people work on the water? KH: I say two thirds of us at least. One third of us is probably oil field. [Laughs] If you don t have a boat here you work in the oil field. AH: Can you tell me about the relationship between the fishermen and the people who work in the oil field? KH: We love each other. We have to love each other because when the fishing gets bad the shrimpers go to the oil field. When the shrimping is good when the oil field is not so good, they shrimp. The fishermen, commercial and recreational, fish off of oil platforms because it s an artificial reef. We all know that fishing is a way of life and we know that the oil field is a way of life so we live together, we work together, and we share when times are good and when times are bad in either occupation. We share.

25 Karen Hopkins 25 AH: Now you know that s going to surprise people who haven t been down here or spent time here, because they re going to think if you re a fisherman you care deeply about clean water and if you re an oil company you re a polluter. KH: No. AH: That s the popular imagination, so correct those people s understanding. KH: If you re a fisherman you are the greatest conservationist there is. I ve never met a fisherman who wants to go out there and kill everything on the water. They have a deep respect for our fish and our wildlife because it s not a job; it s a way of life. We know that the oil field and the big oil companies, it s not a purposeful thing. This was an accident. It was an accident that has become a crime. AH: Explain what you mean by that. KH: The explosion was an accident. I believe that. There was a degree of human negligence and greed but it was an accident. No one meant for eleven people to die. No one meant for this to happen, okay, but the response to this has become a crime, simply because the government has so much bureaucratic red tape that they refuse to waive. Our President, through his inaction, has furthered it. He did not suspend the Jones Act like he should have. Our government did not have the proper emergency response equipment that they were supposed to have in place and there have been so many out-of-state, outof-town subcontractors brought into these coastal communities who have no idea what they re dealing with, have no idea what the currents are, where the marshes are, but they re there making money and doing nothing. That s where the crime is. The crime is the death of our coastal regions due to the inadequacy of the federal government, the state government, and in some cases even the local governments, and the corruption of all of

26 Karen Hopkins 26 the above, because there s corruption running rampant in all stages, even the subcontractors here. If they can bill BP a million dollars a week for doing nothing, you better believe it s happening, and that s where the crime is. AH: Can you tell me, if we go back to day three, or something of this, so the accident happens, you think you can t control that. If you had to play out what should have happened, what does it look like to you? KH: Well what should have happened is that five hundred thousand-dollar additional blowout preventer that every other country in the world demands, that should have been in place. AH: So that s it. That s a regulation problem from--. KH: That s a federal government regulation problem, Mineral Management Services. You can t put the fox in charge of the henhouse because when you wake up in the morning you won t have any chickens left. You can t put Dracula in charge of a blood bank and expect to have blood the next morning, okay, and you have Mineral Management people who want to work for the oil business because they ll get an increase in salary and you have oil people who are ready to retire from the oil business because they ve peaked, they re sixty-five, and they want a cushy government retirement job, so it s corruption, plain and simple. AH: Now something I ve been trying to figure out because it seems complicated to me, is on the one hand it seems like more government regulation or better regulation could have helped prevent this, like you were saying, but at the same time some of the government regulation is that bureaucratic red tape that s tying you down, so help me figure that out.

27 Karen Hopkins 27 KH: What we need is less government involvement in personal lives. We need less government regulation in our personal aspects of our life. Okay. But when it involves something like deep water drilling with a potential to pollute an ecosystem we need strict government regulations. We need strict government policing of those regulations. We need an emergency plan put in place where all of the government regulations and bureaucratic nightmares drop to the wayside when something like this happens. In other words, when a catastrophe like this happens there should be a plug that you pull on the bureaucracy and say, look, anything works. This is war. We don t need regulations right now. We need solutions, we need action, and if there would be that one plug that you could pull to undo all the bureaucratic red tape involved in stopping this catastrophe, that s what you need. AH: So do I understand you right that you would say you re comfortable with the federal regulators being all over something like BP as long as they re not in your house? KH: Absolutely. AH: That s the right balance. KH: I m comfortable with our industries, our big producing industries, our manufacturing industries being regulated by the government because in essence the federal government is there to protect. Okay. I m not in favor of our industries and our manufacturers being taxed to the point where they have to leave the country. I believe that the government needs to level the playing field with our--. Because we are not a nation of manufacturers anymore, we re a nation of consumers, and that s why we re in the trouble we re in today. AH: But that s not true here in Grand Isle.

28 Karen Hopkins 28 KH: Well we produce but we re taxed half to death too, and here in Grand Isle you re going to find out that we feel as though we are forgotten to a degree. We feel as though we have been sacrificed by the greed, by the corruption. AH: By whose greed and whose corruption? KH: By the government s greed, by big industry s greed. We feel like we ve been sacrificed. We ve been lied to time and time again. By President Obama we ve been lied to. He visited us--us, I would say, but none of us--he visited three, four people and had boiled crawfish with them and then he walked on the beach with Charlotte Randolph, the Lafourche Parish president, and took pictures, and made promises that we won t be forgotten. We will make you whole. That s a lie. That s a lie. We can t be made whole again. No one can replace what was stolen from the Gulf Coast region. The only person who can ever replace this is God, not Obama, not BP. We ll never be made whole again. We never imagined that something like this would take us down. We were always prepared for that one storm that was going to wipe us out. We could imagine that, we could see it. AH: Can you describe how this is different from a storm? KH: It never ends. It never ends. If they stop the spill today we don t know how many years of destruction we re looking at. They talk about, oh, we re going to plug that well and in four months we ll have everything cleaned up and we ll be out of there. Bull shit. It s lies. It s propaganda. It s feel-good PR. This is years. Twenty-one years later, Valdese, Prince William Sound, they re still digging oil up out of the beach. The herring still have not recovered, twenty-one years later. People are still dying from occupational health problems from working in the cleanup, twenty-one years later, and this is beyond

29 Karen Hopkins 29 the scope of Valdese times, what, one thousand, and they re telling us, we re going to stop the oil, we re going to clean up, and everything s going to be great. AH: Tell me about how business has been? When did you get your last shrimp boat? KH: The last time I unloaded a shrimp boat was two thousand pounds of shrimp and it happened on July 4, and I haven t seen a shrimp boat since other than to come in and get fuel to go back out and work in the Vessels of Opportunity program. Typically in July we would have close to three million pounds of shrimp bought, by this date, mid- July, about three million pounds. I have a hundred twenty thousand pounds of shrimp bought for July, no fish. July 1 was the beginning of the Gulf of Mexico king mackerel season. That is a huge financial plus for us. I have not bought one pound of king mackerel. June 1, amberjack season, greater amberjack, not one pound of greater amberjack. This business is holding on through sheer determination of Dean and his wife and me and the people who love it. I mean we re holding on by renting dock space to barges, which are now no longer there because they re out in the channels and in the marshes. We re holding on by selling fuel to the boats who participate in the Vessels of Opportunity program. We don t know how much longer we can hold on. Really I think Dean is still in business, still opening the doors every day, because he doesn t know what to do if he can t open the doors. AH: What do you think you ll do if he says he has to close up? KH: I don t know. I don t want to ever think about leaving here. I never wanted to leave here. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life here. If I have to leave I will but I don t know what I m going to do. I have enough confidence in my abilities and

30 Karen Hopkins 30 in my knowledge and in my work ethic and in who I am to know that I can make it. I can survive. I can go anywhere in this country and in this world and make a living somehow, but it s not what I want to do, and I m very resentful of that because when I told you about looking out my windows and seeing freedom, now when I look out of my windows I feel like I m a prisoner that s been wrongly convicted of a crime because we didn t do anything wrong. It s not just the money. It s not even the money. It s the ability to be able to go to my friend s house in the marsh at night and catch fish and have fun and laugh. It s the ability to go to work in the morning and know that I m going to make money for my employer and know that I m going to see people every day come into my office who love what they re doing, love what they re doing. I m terrified that this is going to be the death of the seafood industry along the Gulf Coast, and if the seafood industry dies then the culture of our people is going to die with it, and that s my biggest fear. Nobody could ever--. You can t replace that. You can t put a price on that, stealing someone s dreams and stealing someone s heritage and stealing someone s life, and forcing them to make decisions that they shouldn t ever have had to make in the first place. It s hard to wake up every morning with a broken heart, and for the past three months I have. I ve woke up every morning with this grief and I found myself starting to isolate myself from people who I knew looked to me for advice and guidance with the fisheries. I m an online advocate of commercial fishermen. I have a little cause that I started and it s Support Our Country s Commercial Fishermen, and I have members from Alaska to Hawaii. I have almost ten thousand members now. I found myself isolating myself from them because I didn t want them to ask me the question about what was

31 Karen Hopkins 31 happening because I didn t want to watch the heartache in their eyes when I told them what I thought the truth was. It s a terrible, terrible feeling when you grow up in a culture that so many people in the world and the country love and respect and you have to watch it die right before your eyes and you have to watch the old people who look forward every day to getting on their boat, and you just watch these people and they re lost and they don t know what to do. They don t know where to go. It s a slow, tormenting death of a culture. [Pause] AH: What do you do? KH: What do I do about what? What do I do about what? AH: To get out of bed in the morning and to move forward? Is there a politician you feel you could call that would make a difference? Are there people that are supporting each other here? I mean is there anything? KH: The only thing that I do to get--. I get out of bed in the morning and there s only one reason that I do get out of bed in the morning and go to that office every day, because I m programmed to work. I worked for Dean Blanchard seven days a week for almost seven years. I ve put in as much as a hundred twenty hours a week. My sole motivation at this point to get out of the bed and go to work in the morning is Dean Blanchard because I absolutely--. I love the man. I mean he s my brother. He s my friend. He s not my boss, he s my partner. I love his business, I love him, and I see that he needs me now more than he s ever needed me before and I can t let him down, and until he tells me, Karen, look, this is how it is and I don t need you anymore, then I ll be able to make plans for the rest of my life on what I m going to do. But as long as Dean needs me I m going to be there for him because there was never a time that I needed

32 Karen Hopkins 32 something or somehow needed anything that he ever refused me. He s never turned his back on me and we ve been fighting together for almost seven years and I m not going to quit on him. That s my sole motivation, is Dean. That s pretty much it. It s hard. It s hard to go to work every day and watch him rage against what s going on and watch him sit in his office and cry sometimes. It s hard. Like I said it s one of the most difficult things I ve ever had to watch. As far as calling someone for help and support, [Pause] Dean does that. I mean I do a lot of--. I spend a lot of time online letting people know in different areas of the country what s going on, and that gives me an outlet to express some of the anger and the depression and the hopelessness. AH: That s an organization you started before this. KH: Yes, Support Our Country s Commercial Fishermen. I started it about a year ago online and it took off. It just took off and I set up the Louisiana Shrimp Association as the beneficiary of any donations and it just exploded. AH: Have you been getting some donations? KH: Yeah, yeah, Louisiana Shrimp Association gets the donations. And I think most of all the purpose I set it up for was more for moral support and more to educate people who are not commercial fishermen or who don t live on the water. I wanted to educate them on where their seafood is coming from. I wanted to educate them on how it gets to their tables and how much respect that they need to show these people who are bringing this food to them. I wanted to promote our American wild caught product against the poison that s being brought in from overseas, and that was my sole purpose in starting it and it just exploded and I had to pick someone to be the recipient of any

33 Karen Hopkins 33 donations at one point so I chose the Louisiana Shrimp Association because they do extraordinary work for our fishermen and our shrimpers. AH: You have this audience of you said ten thousand people. KH: Yeah, almost ten thousand members. AH: What is it you want them to know about your situation today? KH: Well no matter which direction my life takes me because of this oil spill, no matter what job position I might have to take in the future or where I have to relocate, my heart is always going to be here, in Grand Isle, it s always going to be in Louisiana, and my heart is always going to be with the fishermen and on the water. If I end up in Iowa I m still going to be on the computer and I m still going to be promoting my fishermen and I m still going to be fighting for what I believe is right and I m still going to fight the government for their overregulation of our fisheries and I m not going to give up. My heart is going to still be where it is today. My body might have to be somewhere else but my heart s not leaving. My soul is here. AH: I don t think you re going to end up in Iowa. KH: [Laughs] AH: I don t see that for you. KH: I hope not. I hope not. I d much rather oysters and shrimp to corn. AH: [Laughs] You got to put a little corn in the shrimp bowls though, right, just a little? KH: That s only if you have like Yankees coming for dinner. AH: [Laughs] So they ve been serving that to me because I m from Connecticut? KH: Yeah, yeah.