December 2, 2023 — In October 2023, wrecking crews finished scrapping the last of a dozen fishing boats that had once owned by the notorious New England fishing magnate nicknamed “The Codfather.” Carlos Rafael, who started out as a fish gutter in New Bedford, Massachusetts, aggressively worked — and sometimes cheated — his way up the ladder, eventually coming to dominate New England’s groundfish fishery (which includes cod, hake, flounder and other white fish) before a 2017 court decision sent him to prison for nearly four years and forced him to sell off his fleet. The sale, completed during his prison sentence, would earn him another $100 million. It was a profitable end for a fishing empire built on seafood fraud, tax evasion and consolidation.
So when the private equity-backed Blue Harvest Fisheries announced in 2020 that it was buying most of Rafael’s fleet and putting the boats back to work, some welcomed it as good news for the port of New Bedford, the hub of Cape Cod’s fishing industry. But others were alarmed that Blue Harvest’s majority equity holder was the Dutch-owned firm Bregal Partners — and that most of the money would ultimately move through a Swiss holding company and into the hands of a family of European billionaires, with only a tiny fraction going to the local fishing community. Now, only three years after assuming control and becoming the dominant player in the New England groundfish fishery, Blue Harvest has suspended its operations and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, leaving many fishermen unemployed once again.
In filing for Chapter 7, Blue Harvest may be leaving as much as $100 million in outstanding debts — many of them to local vendors who performed maintenance and upgrades on its fleet. An investigation by the New Bedford Light has found that the bankruptcy is likely an avenue for Bregal to avoid paying those debts and maximize the cash it could extract.