The ports are quiet in the remote Russian island of Sakhalin, just north of Japan. Fishing boats return home empty. Most canneries stopped operating years ago.
But further out in the waters off the narrow, green island off Russia's eastern coast, boats jockey for position to catch the region's valuable crabs and fish. The catches are destined for Japan, avoiding Russian ports, taxes and fishing quotas.
Vitaly Gamov, a career military man and commander in Russia's border guards, came here in November 2000 to fight that illegal fishing. His mission cost Gamov his life.
In late May, attackers threw three flaming jars of gasoline through his kitchen window. He died from the burns a week later. His wife, Larisa, recently regained consciousness after five skin grafts in a hospital in Japan. Their 14-year old son, Ivan, escaped unharmed.
Gamov died trying to change the rules in a system that is built on the corrupt compromises between business and the government that have taken hold in Russia in the chaotic decade since the fall of the Soviet Union.
President Vladimir V. Putin says he wants to break those links, but the roots run deep.
Last year Putin's economics minister insisted on the sale of fishing rights at auctions to get more revenue from the industry and move control of it to Moscow. That infuriated regional governors and fishing companies that until then had fished virtually free.
"Sakhalin has very big poaching problems," said Sergei Darkin, governor of the neighboring Primorsky region. "Gamov fought hard against poaching."
After the fire, Putin intervened to send a severely burned Gamov to a hospital in Japan. Local clinics were not well enough equipped to treat his injuries.
In recent years Russia has lost control of the fishing industry here, as it has of much else. When the government imposed fishing quotas and tried to levy taxes on the profits of Russian fishermen, the fishermen responded by falsifying their records and delivering their catches directly to Japan and South Korea, where the buyers asked no questions.
A study last year by the World Wildlife Fund of illegal fishing in the Russian portion of the Bering Sea found evidence of illegal activities at "virtually all levels" of the industry.
The report estimates that fishing firms illegally strip US$4 billion from the waters each year, "putting numerous marine species at risk and contributing to the collapse" of fish supplies.
The Russian border patrol of which Gamov was a part, impoverished by budget cuts and hampered by widespread corruption, is no match for the rich and powerful industry. One fishing company manager on Sakhalin said border guards would agree to ignore a poacher's boat in return for a US$2,500 bribe.
Illegal fishing costs the government about US$500 million a year in missed taxes, according to the state Fishing Committee.
Evidence of declining stocks abounds.
One Sakhalin crab poacher, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, said that in the early 1990s he caught enough to make three selling runs a week to Japan. Last year he made the trip barely once a week.
"We always had poachers, but never in these proportions," said the president of the Far East Fishery Association, Vladimir Gorshechnikov. "I've been in fishing for many years, but even for me this situation is horrifying."
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