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Mark Freeman Commentary 'Catch A Poacher' program catches on By MARK FREEMAN Lovers of Oregon's fish and wildlife ought to send Ken E. Yi of Eugene a thank-you letter. The 70-year-old dry cleaner bought gall bladders from poached black bears, making Yi a bit player in what police say is a major Oregon poaching ring. Yi's special place in Oregon's wildlife-enforcement history came with his court-ordered $3,300 check to help make Oregon a tough place to run a poaching business. Yi is the first donor -- an unwilling donor, of course, but still the first -- to a program called "Catch A Poacher." The program will pay cash to wildlife snitches who help special Oregon State Police game officers catch and convict those big-time poachers who make big bucks selling Oregon's wildlife as if it were their own. Some cases take years to develop, and often rely on someone from the inside of a big-time poacher's circle of confidence -- an employee, a customer or even a family member -- to get a conviction. Catch A Poacher, or CAP, will help recruit witnesses from those inner circles by offering significant cash payments to people who can deliver the goods on the really bad guys. "That's what our unit is designed to do -- catch the toughest of the tough, the baddest of the bad," says Sgt. Walt Markee of the Special Investigation Unit of the OSP's Fish and Wildlife Division. "This is one tool to help us." A similar tool worked in catching and convicting Donald Scott Dungey, and his son Jason F. Dungey, in their Medford-based poaching ring. An informant in that 1998 case was paid $10,000 from a special U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fund for paying informants in big federal wildlife cases. "I didn't have any (state) money to give the informant in the Dungey case," says Markee, one of the investigators who nabbed Dungey. "Not all cases are (federal) cases. That's why I need to set up this fund." And Yi became its first contributor last month when a Douglas County judge ordered him to pay $3,300 into CAP as part of his sentence for illegally buying and possessing a gall bladder from a poached bear. Oregon has a history of supporting programs that offer money for information in wildlife case. The Turn In Poachers, or TIP, program pays thousands of dollars annually as rewards to members of the public who help in fish and wildlife enforcement. The fund is administered through the Oregon Hunters Association for the OSP, which cannot legally administer such a fund. While CAP will work much the same way, it will target a different segment of informant, says Capt. Lindsay Ball, who heads the OSP's Fish and Wildlife Division. CAP will pay cash to informants who provide information in very specific, focused cases -- not the my-neighbor-shot-a-doe-last-night kind of cases you see funneled through TIP, Ball says. The payments will be used, for instance, to pay $5,000 to an informer who may spend a few months or more collecting the goods on a specific poacher. That's far beyond what TIP could ever do. "We didn't get to Dungey through the TIP program," Ball says, "We got to Dungey by other means of investigation." And Dungey has helped spur this fund into existence. Markee has been giving presentations across the state about the Dungey case, in which police say out-of-state clients paid Dungey thousands of dollars to poach as many as a dozen trophy animals in Southern Oregon. Everyone who hears the case is outraged. That's when Markee tells them about CAP. The Oregon Wildlife Heritage Foundation found CAP so intriguing that the Portland-based group has signed on to manage CAP. With Yi's $3,300 in seed money, Markee hopes the foundation accumulates about $10,000 to get CAP rolling. Once it gets going, CAP will be bolstered by more judge-imposed fines until the fund -- like TIP -- becomes self-sufficient. Markee and Ball don't worry that publicly discussing CAP will reduce its effectiveness. In fact, publicizing the fund could do more than get donations. It puts big-time wildlife criminals on notice that the greedy people in their circles of confidants might take the cops' money instead of theirs. "We're teaching people to pick their friends wisely -- and don't get divorced," Markee says. "We might come knocking." (Staff writer Mark Freeman covers the outdoors for the Mail Tribune. He can be reached at 776-4470.) Outdoor Journal main page Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA