EP 401. Operation Stoned Duck (Part 1): “The Cat”

 

Interviewing the Retired Undercover Game Warden

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere from Rankin County, Mississippi. In fact, I’m right here in my backyard. That’s where today’s ongoing story, it’s going to be a kind of episodic what we’re fixing to do right here, it’s where it concludes right here, right where I’m standing today. I think everybody listening can relate to the fact that some of us are young, intemperate. We make bad decisions. A lot of us listening, just lucky enough not to get caught, would you all agree to that. Kicking off the episode, the series, I should say Mr. Kennie Prince, retired undercover game warden from the great state of Mississippi. Kennie, how the heck are you?

Kennie Prince: I’m doing good. Glad to be here today.

Ramsey Russell: Yes sir. What’s your story, Kennie? I mean, I’ve read your book, The Poacher’s Nightmare, but where did you get started? I mean, are you born and raised right here in Rankin County or?

Kennie Prince: I was born and raised right here in Brandon, Mississippi, Rankin County. Grew up running up and down Richland Creek swamps and mom and daddy looking for me, most of the time.

Ramsey Russell: You told me we’ve got kind of a – we had met many years ago when my youngest son was trapping. And you had bought some furs from him. You’ve been trapping for a long time. Talk about that a little bit.

Kennie Prince: Well, I started trapping in 1968 when I was 8 years old. My father owned a bait shop here on highway 471 out of Rankin County. I got to meet with all the game wardens and trappers and fishermen as they had come by each day to buy bait. And there was one guy that trapped and he got me interested in it when I would see all the critters he had in his truck. So, he finally showed me how to set a trap. He wouldn’t take me with him, but he showed me how to set one and told me what to do. And I kept doing it until I finally caught something.

Ramsey Russell: What was it appealed to you in 1968 about all those critters? Was it touching them? Was it the money that come out of the fur back in those days?

Kennie Prince: Well, I didn’t even know you could sell fur in 1968. Neither did my father. But I would say watching Daniel Boone tv shows, that was probably my hero growing up, having a few other westerns. But I was intrigued by that, and that just got me started and I kept going.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, where did it take you? I mean, were you doing that just full time through high school, college?

Kennie Prince: Well, once I started catching a few critters, my daddy realized I could sell the fur. I didn’t even know they had a season for trapping back then, so I would have probably been trapping out of the season. But I knew some of the local game wardens and they would try to discourage me from doing certain things.

Ramsey Russell: Like what?

Kennie Prince: Well, I was – They would generally tell me what I was doing wrong when I would tell them what I did. But being as young as I was, I didn’t quite understand what all they were talking about. But when my daddy realized how much the fur market was beginning to grow, he actually started buying me traps for Christmas and bought me a book called Trapping North American Fur Bearers by S. Stanley Hawbaker. And there wasn’t any videos back then, so learned everything.

Ramsey Russell: You got a bunch of traps. I mean, you’re still trapping I know that, your truck, when I pull up and see you forward, I’m like, that’s a trapper. I see your stakes, I see your traps, I see everything going on. And I know you trap beaver too though.

Kennie Prince: I trap everything right now, I still trap for a living. That’s what I do.

Ramsey Russell: When you started this whole thing, were you targeting beaver kind of water sets with conibears or were you after upland?

Kennie Prince: I was mainly trapping ditches and things, trapping mink, coon, beaver, otters were a few then. Now there’s otters everywhere. But back in the day when you caught an otter that was a trophy, when I was growing up. Then I started trapping around people’s chicken houses, trying to catch a fox that was getting the chickens and just slowly grew from there.

Ramsey Russell: Were you a hunter growing up or just a trapper?

Kennie Prince: Oh, my daddy carried me hunting as far back as I can remember. I actually had a disease when I was real young. I couldn’t walk on my right leg. I had a disease called Legg Perth AIDS disease. And my daddy would actually take me hunting on his back for 2 and a half years.

Ramsey Russell: What and where were you all hunting?

Kennie Prince: We hunted over around Vicksburg. That was only deer back then. There wasn’t any deer in Rankin County.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Kennie Prince: And we would go over to Vicksburg and we would hunt over there and kill my first deer. Just a yacht and a deer club there. And actually, trapping on that property now on Ms. Daggery’s place over there. But through that time, my daddy was, he was a good Christian man, but he took me everywhere. I mean, he was never a discourager. He was always an encourager.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kennie Prince: And he worked all the time. But it was always time for me. He always had time to take me hunting.

Ramsey Russell: How old you have been back in those days that you kind of, like we all do. A lot of us grow up hunting with family members and our daddies who take us out. And then we get to an age, we get a driver’s license and we start hunting on our own. Was you still an avid hunter back then? By that age?

Kennie Prince: Oh, I just got worse. As I got older, I got worse. I’ll tell you a little story. My daddy knew that after school before I got a driver’s license, I was going squirrel hunting on Mr. Kennedy’s place on Shiloh Road outside of Brandon. And there used to be a sawmill back there. Mr. Kennedy, daddy told me we were going to go down there and ask Mr. Kennedy if I could hunt back there. So we go and I ride with him to see Mr. Kennedy. And when we do, my daddy told Mr. Kennedy that he wanted to see if I could hunt on his place, Mr. Kennedy said, why are you asking? He’s down here every afternoon after school. Said, I hear him shooting back there, but thankfully, Mr. Kennedy back then, there wasn’t any deer clubs, but he allowed me to keep hunting and over time, I hunted on all his property.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard rumors, stories. I’ve heard it said that some of the best game wardens were at one time, some of the best outlaws. Is there any truth to that?

Kennie Prince: Well, I wouldn’t say I was the best outlaw, but I probably couldn’t read very good. I didn’t understand what posted man, especially if it was a turkey goblin.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, that hadn’t changed a bit, has it?

Kennie Prince: No, something about that turkey would make me just want to go across that fence line.

Ramsey Russell: What about bag limits? I mean, I’m just asking. I know this is a long time ago and, boy, we got a lot of story to get into, but I’m just trying to form a foundation of what – I shared some of the stuff I was like when I was young and intemperate and, boy, was I not good. But what were some of the things you might have done back in those days that you got away with made you a better game warden later in life?

Kennie Prince: Well, I would say I couldn’t count very good.

Ramsey Russell: Squirrels, ducks, turkey, deer.

Kennie Prince: Squirrels, ducks whatever it was that I was hunting. But I would say that the biggest thing, though, I know I violated the law as far as exceeding bag limits and things like that, but my daddy didn’t believe in wasting anything. If I shot it, we were going to eat it.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Kennie Prince: And as – I mean, didn’t matter if it was deer or turkey or what it was, we were going to eat it. It wasn’t being wasted. So, I never looked at it as being an issue. And I would say the only time the game wardens ever really got after me was hunting in some closed areas, which they never caught me, but they got after me quite a bit.

Ramsey Russell: Like posted properties or public lands or sanctuaries.

Kennie Prince: When they built the Ross Barnett Reservoir, they closed part of it to duck hunting.

Ramsey Russell: They sure did.

Kennie Prince: But always trapped on there. You could still trap in that area. Well, the game wardens would be eating breakfast at Pelahatchie Bay Trading Post. I’d be behind the trading post shooting ducks in the morning and which I would never shoot over 2 times. But I was shooting them on the water, too.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kennie Prince: So, I would. But now we’re shooting them deep. We would eat them, but they tried to catch me several times doing that and they never did catch me.

Ramsey Russell: Kennie, how’d you go from a young and reckless but normal teenage years and young man years doing that kind of stuff to ending up in law enforcement for the state of Mississippi.

Kennie Prince: Well, I got a ticket for setting traps without a license, but I had called a game warden to meet me at Plumber Slough, same place we’re talking about shooting the ducks. And he said he would meet me there before cell phones and everything were out. He would meet me there that morning to sell me my hunt license, I mean, my trapping license. And I asked him if I could go ahead and start setting my traps. He knew right where I parked. He’d checked me there many times before and he told me to go ahead and start setting them. Well, he had told his supervisor that he was going to meet me. Well, his supervisor came and sent him somewhere else.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Kennie Prince: He was one of the ones that been wanting to catch me back in there. So he came back there and wrote me a ticket for trapping without a license and I took him to court. I went to court and I was probably 17 years old and I went before the judge and I’ll never forget that. I had no idea what I was doing. Never been to court before in my life. And I asked the other game warden to get on the stand after they had gone through the prosecutorial side. And all I did was ask him, did you tell me I could set my traps and you were going to bring me my license? And when he said yes, the judge kind of got irate. And he dismissed the charge and the next time I saw that judge, I was wearing one of those uniforms, standing before him as a game warden.

Ramsey Russell: Well, how’d you go from getting that ticket, being the most wanted guy, that a guy would cross a line like that and set you up to wearing that green uniform?

Kennie Prince: Well, I had an opportunity to meet some other people that worked for the Department of Wildlife and a fella that my father knew. He introduced me to somebody, but I took a job as a fisheries technician. They didn’t have any opening. I’d graduated from college. I have been working-

Ramsey Russell: What’s your degree in?

Kennie Prince: I just had a bachelor’s degree of science.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kennie Prince: But then I had worked as a guide in Colorado for 3 and a half years. So I was guiding mule deer and elk hunts out there. And in the fall, then I’d come back. It took me 6 years to get a 4 year degree.

Ramsey Russell: So quick?

Kennie Prince: Yeah, but when I graduated, I’m thankful, my mother and father encouraged me to finish school and I mainly finished school because of them.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Becoming a Game Warden

And so once a position came open in law enforcement in Rankin County, I took that, which was about 5 or 6 years into my career with the department. So then I became a full fledged game warden.

Kennie Prince: I had an opportunity to become a game warden one time. There was a position open in Rankin County in my last semester of school, but I turned it down because I wanted to finish school for my mom and daddy.

Ramsey Russell: I can get you going to college. I can get you taking a fisheries tech, because now you’re outside, you’re interacting with the resource you’re out in every day, which I think a lot of kids that get into wildlife, that’s what they want to do. They want to do the field work. That’s why we get into this field anyway. But still, where did you go from a fisheries biologist to wearing a badge?

Kennie Prince: Well, I wasn’t a fisheries biologist. I was a technician. All I was doing was the field work. I was working under a biologist, but that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me because I was learning so much about fisheries. I thought I knew something about fisheries, but I didn’t even realize we had so many fish in the state of Mississippi until I started working with them. And they taught me all about aquatic vegetation. But I was getting paid to set nets and catch fish. I was shocking fish, which I thought was illegal, but we were taking fish samples for every day, the biological end of it, which taught me a lot. And then later on, the alligators were starting to become such a problem. And again, I grew up here in Rankin County on Pearl River. I chased a few alligators before too and once they started catching the nuisance alligators, they had one they couldn’t catch. And I asked them if I could go with them to help them catch it. Jim Light was the biologist then –

Ramsey Russell: I remember Jim.

Kennie Prince: Over the alligator program and anyway, he said, well, come go with me tonight. I said, no, we go catch him right now. So we go and we caught the alligator. And Jim said, how did you learn how to do that? I said, well, I didn’t always work for the Department of Wildlife. I said, I have chased a few alligators before, but then in doing that, at that time when you went to work for Department of Wildlife, everybody went through law enforcement, became a law enforcement. You carried a badge and a gun so you could help the law enforcement officers.

Ramsey Russell: Everybody was collateral, probably.

Kennie Prince: Right. And so once a position came open in law enforcement in Rankin County, I took that, which was about 5 or 6 years into my career with the department. So then I became a full fledged game warden.

Ramsey Russell: Based on some of the stories you told us in the last few minutes, did you ever find yourself? Did you ever, like, just look in the mirror when you wearing that badge and that green uniform, go and just laugh at yourself going, man, I can’t believe this is where this came.

Kennie Prince: When I came before Judge Jones that first time and he looked at me. He almost fell off the bench. He was like, what are you doing standing there in that uniform? But I felt like John Wayne. I was the proudest I’d ever been as far as being able to wear that uniform.

Ramsey Russell: Well, when you start off as a greenhorn game warden in state of Mississippi, it’s been back in the late 70s, early 80s.

Kennie Prince: Well, now it had been 83 when I went to work, so it would have probably been in the late 80s when I went full time law enforcement.

Ramsey Russell: What kind of cases were you working back in those days?

Kennie Prince: Mainly just working ducks, doves, deer road hunting cases, headlighting. Headlighting was always a big thing as far as people poaching deer at night.

Ramsey Russell: Losing count, the duck blind, losing count, the squirrel bag.

Kennie Prince: Yeah. And they were all swollen at reservoir with the water working on it. It was never slow here. It was always something to do. It didn’t make a lot of money. I mean, working in law enforcement don’t, but, I mean, I’d have paid them to let me do it. I was having so much fun.

Ramsey Russell: How did your background as a hunter make you a better game warden as a hunterman and a trapperman and knowing what you do about fisheries?

Kennie Prince: Well, I think with all the levels I went through with the department, that helped me to learn more because I was working with Jim Light as a – he was a game biologist, so I got to learn more about deer and wildlife management. So becoming a game warden then, I had all that under my belt so I could learn, I knew more about what I was actually working to do as far as protecting wildlife. But I loved interacting with the hunters. Some of the worst outlaws I worked, they were my friends, too.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kennie Prince: I mean, I chase them and then I’d sit around and talk to them after I caught them or I had one old guy that I chased all the time on the reservoir, that he and I became the best of friends. We were like, I always had the sheepdog and the coyote. We would pass each other with a lunchbox. He’d be sitting nets on the reservoir. We’d sit and drink coffee. But I got after him one night on the water out there.

Ramsey Russell: And what was he doing?

Kennie Prince: He was running illegal nets.

Ramsey Russell: Oh I see, catching catfish or just?

Kennie Prince: Catfish, buffalo. You couldn’t commercial fish on Ross Barnett, so he couldn’t set nets. And it was just a game, I mean, for him and me. He even told me one time when I called him once, he got away a whole lot more than I caught him. But he said, it’s just cost of doing business. But I got after him one night and we liked to hit head on, on the reservoir and we wanted –

Ramsey Russell: Did one of you had lights on?

Kennie Prince: Nope. And as I can still remember seeing his eyes, they were big as pie plates when we went by each other, which I’m sure mine were too. And we could have high five, that’s how close we were together. And he got away, I chased him all over the water that night, but he got away. He knew the water better than the fish did. And oh, Carol, the next day, I was sitting at the bay drinking coffee and he come walking in, which all the hunters would sit in one spot and I’d sit over there kind of by myself and Carol come walking by and he looked over at me, says, do you mind if I sit down? Will you? I said, no, have a seat. He sat down, slept on his coffee there just a minute. And he looked up at me. He said, that mighty close last night. I said, yeah. We both kind of laughed. But over time, me and Carol became real good friends. I’d write him a ticket, he’d go by the house and get his nets even when I wasn’t home. That’s how much I trusted him.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, he had paid a fine to come get his nets.

Kennie Prince: He do. He backed me up several times, too. When I had called somebody else, he helped me out.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Kennie Prince: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: How long did you do that as a game warden? Out and out, wearing a green uniform and badge game warden. How long was that into your career?

Kennie Prince: I was probably about 5 or 6 years. I started working with the US Fish & Wildlife special agent Robert.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Kennie Prince: And when he was new here, he didn’t know the area, so he got with me and we started working together and built a relationship there. And I started working a lot more with Fish & Wildlife on duck cases. When duck season would open, I pretty much stayed with them, working Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas.

Ramsey Russell: What was the difference in you working for yourself chasing folks versus working in cooperation with Fish & Wildlife? How did your job change? How did the way you did stuff change?

Kennie Prince: Well, the main thing I was working plain clothes and we would work, doing a whole lot more surveillance type work where we would just watch hunters, count the ducks and if they weren’t doing anything wrong, we normally would never even contact them.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, a lot of times – I’ve known that, a lot of times you might have been sitting in the bushes watching the blind if you suspected was doing something wrong and you’re watching ducks fall and seeing what’s what, see if they’re trying to do right. What was your intent?

Kennie Prince: We would actually just sit and count the ducks, id them and count them and they didn’t do anything wrong, we just never contact them.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Did you ever go sit, like, sit around a restaurant, just eat a hamburger and listen, see what the chatter was about?

Kennie Prince: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Is that how you all developed a lot of leads, a lot of complaints.

Kennie Prince: We did a lot of flying to locate the birds. And you could also, by flying, you could tell where the baited holes were.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. How was it? How would you tell something like that?

Kennie Prince: Generally, the way the ducks were concentrated.

Ramsey Russell: Standing on top of each other.

Kennie Prince: If they were all piled up in one corner of the water, then you knew there was something they were all after right there.

Ramsey Russell: It surprised me. Back when I was doing mid winter waterfowl counts very briefly for the federal government. You get 500ft, 700ft above there on a clear day, like a day and nobody’s been walking in the water and there haven’t been ducks feeding, how clear that water is. And you look, you can see the soil beans, you can see the crops, you can see the bait. I never saw the bait, but I could see where you could see it just looking down, there it is.

How GPS Changed Being a Game Warden

When the GPS units first came out, for years we would see those things. Then we would have to go back at night and try to locate them.

Kennie Prince: Well, that was when the GPS’s had just come out. I generally did a lot of the flying with the feds. One of the agents out of Louisiana would come up and he was a pilot and I would fly with him to locate. I was his spotter, more or less. But it was amazing. When the GPS units first came out, for years we would see those things. Then we would have to go back at night and try to locate them. And it’s amazing how different it is from air when you get on the ground. But I’ll never forget the first time I marked a spot with the GPS. We went back the next night and I’d never used a GPS until this time. When I said, well, we should be standing here, when we cut the lights on, we can see corn on the ground.

Ramsey Russell: Was it duck bait or –

Kennie Prince: No, that was actually baited dove.

Ramsey Russell: Baited dove, yeah.

Kennie Prince: Same difference. It worked the same way.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve seen pictures from air people have shown me where, go out in the middle of Piney Woods, Rankin County, Mississippi and Beta Field, who don’t know, boy, you fly over, you can tell where that disc been running over and over, can’t you? A lot of times you can see them piles laying out there, can’t you?

Kennie Prince: Oh, yeah. You can spot it from there.

Ramsey Russell: That bird’s eye view changes everything, doesn’t it?

Kennie Prince: Makes a world of difference right there.

Ramsey Russell: How long were you working? Just as, I guess a open, I mean, so you’re a game warden out and out. And now you’re working during migratory bird season with Fish & Wildlife Service and you’ll wear plains clothes when you’re cooperating with them. What was the turning point? What was the influence of the turning point to get you into full blown covert operations?

Kennie Prince: I started doing some of the undercover duck hunts. I’d go on like a guided hunt and I’d still doing that through the Fish & Wildlife Service.

Ramsey Russell: You’re a state game warden.

Kennie Prince: I’m a state game warden, but I had federal credentials from the standpoint of working with the feds, as long as I was working on a case for them, I could work anywhere.

Ramsey Russell: Can you talk about one of them cases? Just in generalities if nothing else? Just because I’ve heard game wardens will do that. Book a trip with somebody.

Kennie Prince: Oh, yeah. Well, you would normally, it would be on a tip of some sort that the guide was violating the law by either taking the hunters out, killing the limit, then moving to another spot, killing another limit and so forth, just over bag limits or baited area. But most of the ones we would go on were for exceeding bag limits.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kennie Prince: And, well, I’ll tell you one funny one I had. I went on one where Bob and I were supposed to go together and when Bob and I got to the camp, I actually walked in before Bob and I heard somebody call his name. So I go back out to the vehicle and I tell Bob we had met there. So we’re in 2 vehicles. I told Bob, you got to go. They know who you are in here. So he’s had a family emergency all of a sudden and he left without –

Ramsey Russell: So he pulled up to a commercial hunting operation. Somebody inside said, that’s Bob out of –

Kennie Prince: No. They actually, I go in, Bob’s still at the truck getting hunting stuff. It’s 04:00 daylight. We didn’t go in the night before, we came in early that morning, like 04:30 in the morning. And when I go in, the hunters were all getting ready and I just started introducing myself and all of a sudden I heard one of them in the corner talking about Bob, about how he had checked them somewhere or something. So I had to make a quick exit back to the vehicle and tell Bob to get out of there before somebody spotted him.

Ramsey Russell: But they didn’t know who you were?

Kennie Prince: They didn’t know who I was.

Ramsey Russell: You still able to kind of go on it.

Kennie Prince: But in all that same story, after we’ve been there, after Bob left, all of a sudden, I hear a voice that I recognize and I look over in the corner of the room. There’s this guy putting on his chest waders, he used to be my dentist.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Kennie Prince: Which I looked a lot different, hadn’t seen him in years and wound up going to the blind that day. And sitting beside him in the blind.

Ramsey Russell: He knew who you were?

Kennie Prince: He kept looking at me, going, I know we’ve met before. I said, no, I don’t believe it. I had a head net on, so I kept it up over my face, didn’t want him to see my teeth. If he’d have seen my teeth, he might have recognized.

Ramsey Russell: He’d have recognized you. What’d you have, long hair or something when you was working undercover?

Kennie Prince: Yeah, I had long hair and long beard.

Undercover Game Warden

Our first big case and still probably the biggest case in Mississippi was Operation Cold Storage.

Ramsey Russell: Looking apart, now, at that point in time, were you still a state game warden but working undercover? So your entire undercover career, you were a state game warden working in cooperation with federal credentials with US Fish & Wildlife.

Kennie Prince: Right.

Ramsey Russell: What was your first undercover case?

Kennie Prince: Oh, I would say now, the first state cases, we primarily work small things, like, we used to have a lot of Indian powwows and things where they’d be selling, things they shouldn’t be selling, like animal furs –

Ramsey Russell: Eagle feathers.

Kennie Prince: And things like eagle feathers. Things they were selling what was called, they told us, ceremonial sage, which turned out to be marijuana. They were smoking a peace pipe. And these people were not Indians? Yeah, they claimed to be Indians, but they weren’t Indians. They were making a living off of what – See, Indians can possess and use things for tribal rituals.

Ramsey Russell: Well, maybe on a great, great granddaddy, half removed on the mama’s side, there was.

Kennie Prince: Well, that’s what – But most of them were just trying to make that dollars all they were after any way they could. But in Mississippi, you can’t sell certain parts of animals. And that’s where we would go in. And it was what I called light undercover, because it wasn’t like something you had to go work for years at a time before you could get in with these people. I mean, they just sell it to you.

Ramsey Russell: When was your first involved undercover? Like, now you’ve got your feet up under, you’ve done some of this light stuff. You’ve worked with feds. They like and trust you, you like the job. You’re good at it, obviously. Now you’re getting sent on a mission that’s going to be more than just going to a powwow, just going to be a little more involved. What been your first significant case?

Kennie Prince: Our first big case and still probably the biggest case in Mississippi was Operation Cold Storage.

Ramsey Russell: Cold storage.

Kennie Prince: And we had a – Well, I’ll say, I’d been working on the Mississippi river for about 6 months, posing as a turtle fisherman, just getting to know people, your commercial fishermen and different of the likes, trying to get more into what’s called an illegal crappie market or sac-a-lait, as they’re called in Louisiana. But I would go stay on the Mississippi river for about a week at a time, just bumping into people. But I was acting like I was turtle fishing, so I wasn’t encroaching on their commercial fishing.

Ramsey Russell: Right. You ain’t competition.

Kennie Prince: Right. But I was also a good social person at the landing when they would be taken out with their nets and stuff. And most of it was legal commercial fishing. But you can get into a lot more with once you get to know people. And that’s the hardest thing with wildlife, undercover work, as compared to, like, narcotics. With narcotics, most of the time, the people you’re dealing with are users, so they’ll quickly sell. Just trying to get a quick $25 for their next hit. I’m talking about street level stuff. I’m not talking about major market there, but I had one narcotics agent went to work. I tell this real quick, so you understand, but he said, this is going to be easy, buying rabbits and squirrels and deer. I said, well, let’s see how easy it’s going to be if 6 months after he’d been working, he still hadn’t bought a rabbit, he said, they won’t sell me anything. And the reason I say that is because it takes a whole lot more for a man to take you hunting and fishing with him than it does for him to take you out to eat.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Cutting Out Illegal Hunting

Then we started by the conversations we could hear in the background, we could tell who was talking about shooting deer at night, shooting coons out of a boat, which is illegal. So we slowly started picking out people out of that crowd that we wanted to work. And by the end of that 2 and a half years, we arrested close to 140 people.

Kennie Prince: You got to be somebody’s friend. And I hate to say it that way, because I made a lot of friends over the years working undercover, but later had to put them in jail.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Kennie Prince: But in that same essence, Operation Cold Storage, we set up a fur buying route through Mississippi and Louisiana. And in that route, it was going to be legal. Everything we were doing was purchasing legal fur during the trapping season. And because of my history with trapping, I was able to grade fur and buy fur. And so that’s what we did and we’re just going to see how it went. On our first run, we ran out of money before we got through Mississippi buying legal fur. We then made the route through Louisiana, had to go get more money from one of our bosses. I was a little bit scared, thinking, which we actually were able to turn around and sell all our fur and kept the money coming. So we were doing what was called a storefront, more or less, but it was on wheels. So we had a legal, legitimate operation going where we were buying all these furs. Then we started by the conversations we could hear in the background, we could tell who was talking about shooting deer at night, shooting coons out of a boat, which is illegal. So we slowly started picking out people out of that crowd that we wanted to work. And by the end of that 2 and a half years, we arrested close to 140 people.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Kennie Prince: That was mainly for selling crappie headlighting deer, selling deer ranging from New Orleans up through Mississippi. We had a big group out of New Orleans that was buying lots of meat from one of the guys we were buying from. And so finally we got him. And when we did, we got him to introduce us to the guys he was selling to out of New Orleans. And we made a big case on that, on one of the federal refuges down in south Mississippi.

Ramsey Russell: You mentioned narcotics. That was several of the chapters in your book. There was a lot of overlap between either narcotic, narcotic users or people trafficking in both narcotics small time, big time and wildlife small time, big time. I mean, there’s a lot of overlap in that.

Kennie Prince: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Just cause it’s a cash business, it’s all cash.

Kennie Prince: Yeah, it was all cash. And normally, once you get in good enough with somebody that’s taking you hunting with them.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kennie Prince: If they’re doing something else, they’ll open that door, too.

Ramsey Russell: How long did Operation Cold Storage take you?

Kennie Prince: A little over 2 years.

Ramsey Russell: A little over 2 years. There was a story you said, boy, it’s a real interesting story. You had been somewhere on a guide, one of them undercover guided hunts. And maybe the hunt was just kind of mediocre, but the boys, like, come to North Dakota with me. Talk about that story.

Kennie Prince: Oh, that one turned into a big one. We were working a case jointly with Arkansas at the time and that was Operation Delta. And wound up, I met this guy at the, actually, Mississippi wildlife extravaganza. He had a set up there selling guided hunts. And after I got to know him just a little bit, we booked a hunt with him through the Fish & Wildlife Service. After we got enough probable calls to think he was doing no good. And in doing that, he asked me if I liked the duck hunt and I told him, no, I don’t really like to duck hunt, but I like to kill them. And that kind of set him on fire, he liked that comment I made. But in doing so, we hunted with him over in Arkansas and then he invited us on a hunt to North Dakota, where, once we checked it out, a non resident was not supposed to be guiding in the state of North Dakota. And after going on the hunt, we show up there and I think it was hunters from about 6 different states at this little hotel we were staying at. And they were picking ducks. It was unbelievable, all the ducks they had. And growing up here in Mississippi and shooting ducks in Mississippi, I always heard that all the dumb ones were killed. Well, I can guarantee you that’s true. They killed them all up there before they get down here. But these guys were going out. They would shoot over the limit of ducks in the morning, which we were documenting the ducks the best we could, but we would GPS where all the ducks were left. They wouldn’t bring out but a limit.

Ramsey Russell: So you and your and the other undercover agent will go out and maybe you all shoot 50 ducks. I’m making that number up. Maybe you all, the group that you were helping with, would shoot 50 and you all bring out a limit, say 6 apiece, but they just go –

Kennie Prince: But they love to take pictures.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kennie Prince: So they would take a picture with the ducks and then leave the over limit.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, boy.

Kennie Prince: And bring out the others, which myself or the other undercover would have to go to the restroom all of a sudden, we’d go back out and GPS where the pile was, then we would call that night, we’d have to go to the store. We would call and let them know the GPS coordinates and they were able to take a dog out and retrieve all the ducks at night that we’d shot and left. Well, even after we would hunt in the mornings, we would go right around, which, in North Dakota at the time, you could shoot from the road. We’d ride around, shoot ducks on potholes. All day, but once we found out where they were storing ducks. Now, this was other group that was at the hotel.

Ramsey Russell: Another group there from somewhere out east?

Kennie Prince: Yeah, they were from, I think, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where I believe those fellas were from. I know some are from North Carolina.

Ramsey Russell: There was really, from the sounds of it, at this point, there’s no bag limits, no nothing being observed. You all paid me to hunt, let’s go shoot the f bomb out.

Kennie Prince: Yeah. And that’s pretty much what the fellow we were hunting with was doing. But we were able to find out where the other hunters were keeping their ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Where were they keeping them?

Kennie Prince: They were keeping them at a pizza place.

Ramsey Russell: How’d you find out they were keeping them at a pizza place?

Kennie Prince: Well, I kept telling them I got to hide my duck somewhere and I don’t have anywhere to hide them. And finally, they told me where I could pay a guy and he’d keep them in the cold storage at his pizza place.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Kennie Prince: And, which, when we told the federal agent that, he said, no, no way. I said, well, that’s what they said and they’re leaving in the morning. So they set up surveillance on the place. Sure enough, they showed up at the pizza place and after they loaded up, they headed back to – when they crossed the state line, they stopped them. And I forgot, they said they seized everything but the dog.

Ramsey Russell: Everything but the dog. Was he any good?

Kennie Prince: I don’t know. But they let him keep their dogs. But they seized all their waterfowl. They had way over the limits, which, they got to be tagged.

Ramsey Russell: When was this been on a timeline thereabouts, Kennie? This would have been late 80s, early 90s.

Kennie Prince: This would have been in the 90s. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Because the tag has been a big deal. It’s been on the statutes, I guess since forever.

Kennie Prince: Yeah, I’m going to say it would have probably been in the late 90s when this took place.

Ramsey Russell: But they really started enforcing tags more recently than they’ve existed on the books.

Kennie Prince: Well, a lot of people, like, at the camps and things like that, you’re supposed to leave some type of identifying feathers on the bird that way, on the carcass of the bird once it’s been cleaned. If it’s not at the last place where it’s going to be eaten at home or something like that. So the people need to keep their name and the tag and license number with their ducks. That way if an officer checks them, then they would be legal. As far as if you gave me your birds your name and you’re supposed to sign those birds over to me.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Kennie Prince: So if I got 2 limits, I got your birds with your name on them.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. And I’ve a lot of people listening to buy that now. That’s become a real big deal. We’ve all heard stories of this kind of stuff happening, but I just don’t remember that kind of – I don’t remember tagging issues or tagging violations back in, say, the 80s. It just seems to be more recent than that. Okay, so some of the boys from out of state that were storing their ducks over at the pizza parlor, they got busted on the state line leaving, which made it federal at Lacey Act. What about the operator himself? When did you all spring the trap or put the cuffs on him?

Kennie Prince: He was actually laughing about that. He told us to be careful when we left the hotel. He said some other guys got caught. Well, we were real cautious when we left, but, he wasn’t picked up until later with federal warrants.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. You weren’t there?

Kennie Prince: No.

Ramsey Russell: You have that’s implicit on your remaining undercover.

Kennie Prince: He actually never knew who I was as far as – Well, I mean, he knew who I was before it was over with.

Making the Arrest: Illegal Game Hunters

Plus, they were videoing to make tv shows and video duck hunts that they had enough video footage that they didn’t want to go to court.

Ramsey Russell: Because you had to testify in court or something, is that why they saved you?

Kennie Prince: Most of the cases we did would plead out. We had so much on them. Plus, they were videoing to make tv shows and video duck hunts that they had enough video footage that they didn’t want to go to court.

Ramsey Russell: Now, talk about narcotics. But how did you remain so undercover? I mean, because you’re all over. You’re dealing with a lot of people. It’s a small world. I mean, it’s been proven that we’re all just 6 or 7 handshakes removed from practically everybody in the world. But how did you remain so undercover like that?

Kennie Prince: I’m glad they didn’t have Facebook back then.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, yeah.

Kennie Prince: I don’t know how you could do it nowadays with all the technology we have. But we were even using cameras back then, you still had to wire up. So, wasn’t the digital equipment that was just coming out when I retired. But my family, it was hard on them because it’s tough on a wife to have to – I mean, she can’t acknowledge who I am or what I do anyway. She does who I am. But my family wasn’t supposed to say, I’m in law enforcement. The word was I had been fired from the department. No law enforcement officer that knew me was supposed to acknowledge who I was. If he called me, checked me, he was supposed to check me just like anybody else and they weren’t ever supposed to acknowledge. And our guys and special ops were all deep cover. I mean, we had a history as far as our cover went. So if you pulled me up online, you could find me under my covert name and it’d go back years.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Kennie Prince: As far as post office box –

Ramsey Russell: Was that built? Did somebody in the background build that intentionally?

Kennie Prince: Oh, yeah. All that has to be done through lots of other sources. So you got to have a deep background and through that, we got into a lot of other cases, I worked a lot with ATF and FBI and things like that. It’s amazing what you can find out when you’re working around hunters.

Ramsey Russell: How did you – one of the most interesting things to me about going deep undercover like you’re doing, you’ve got to befriend people. You’ve got to gain their trust through friendship because I’m not going to take a stranger just anywhere duck hunting, I’m not going to go, come to, hey, you want to go to camp? I’ve got to know the guy pretty dang good. And then for that, friendship to developers, got to be a lot of relational history. And the whole time you’re putting yourself into some pretty seedy situations. I mean, you’re right there in the truck with them doing this stuff. How are you the good guy and you stay the good guy, but you friend the bad guys, you ride with the bad guys, they accept you as a bad guy. How do you keep the lines from crossing? That’s got to be daunting, especially if it drags on for a year or more.

Kennie Prince: Well, sometimes it got overwhelming from the standpoint of having what you had to listen to.

Ramsey Russell: Like what?

Kennie Prince: Well, just the vulgarity of some people. And I actually, I had a hard time with that because everything we did was recorded. And after listening, when I first started doing it, I would use the same language they did. And I said, I don’t want that to be played in court. So I said, I’ll just see where it goes and I didn’t. And I never had a problem with it. People would say, well, how did you keep from having to smoke dope? I’d always tell them, I won’t smoke that nasty stuff. I said, now my wife will do it. And that’s how I would buy it. They’d laugh. I never had an issue with nobody trying to push something when I said, well, I’ll buy something for my wife because she’ll smoke that stuff. But I said, I don’t want anything to do with it. And they’d just laugh at me. They wouldn’t push me. But now that was after that trust had been built, to the point of, they knew I was good.

Ramsey Russell: Kennie, you’ve eaten a hamburger. You hear a conversation or you’re selling furs on kind of a legit fur deal as a front and you say, okay, that guy is poaching a lot of deer or trapping a lot of stuff or catching a lot of stuff you shouldn’t be. How did you go from, boom, standing right here, hearing that conversation to being in that man’s pickup truck or in his boat outlawing with him? How in the world do you do that?

Kennie Prince: I think what I learned and I had a lot of failures as far as I’d mess up and I’d say, jump the gun. But I think the more cautious I acted, the more they trusted me.

Ramsey Russell: The more you kept your cards close to your chest and didn’t tell them to.

Kennie Prince: If they would bring up something illegal, I’d tell them, I don’t want nothing to do with that or if they even offered to sell me something illegal, I’d start asking them, are you an undercover game warden? And that would throw the ball back on their part. But I’m also establishing a probable cause.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kennie Prince: By me saying that they know what they’re doing is illegal and if they bring it back up again, well, I may buy coons from them, which are legal raccoon meat. Well, if they had a rabbit laying there and they offered it, I might, nah, I don’t know you good enough. Well, that just made them want to push more towards me, because then they trusted me more by me not jumping on it. I’ve seen the times where they would back up if you jump too quick to something illegal or you’re more interested in buying that illegal deer or something rather than buying coon meat, which was illegal to sell.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You got to kind of ease into it.

Kennie Prince: Yeah. And that, I think, was probably the best thing as far as my career of learning what to do and when not to do. So getting people to trust you, which can be hard too.

Getting People to Trust You

 Well, it may be dangerous, but most of the time, if you got somebody you’re working undercover and they suspect you, they don’t want anything to do with you. 

Ramsey Russell: You ever got shot at?

Kennie Prince: Only when you were wearing a uniform? Never while I worked undercover. And I would like to say that because people take undercover stuff as being, well, that’s so dangerous. Well, it may be dangerous, but most of the time, if you got somebody you’re working undercover and they suspect you, they don’t want anything to do with you. That uniformed officer, whether he be a police officer, game warden, whoever, when he’s walking up to that vehicle to check them, he ain’t got a clue what he’s walking up to. I’ve been in the vehicle with bad guys when we’ve got checked before and he didn’t even know I’d be sitting on top of a gun or one night, we actually got stopped at a roadblock and I was sitting on a bag of marijuana. We had a loaded pistol and a rifle under the back seat. And one guy over here on my left, he’s thrown on crack. The one driving, not driving, but the one in the passenger seat, he was about drunk. He’d been shooting deer out the window. And another undercover was driving and we actually pulled into a roadblock. And all I can say is the good lord was watching over us because we were in a white dodge truck. They had thrown 2 deer in the back of the truck, blood all over the truck. Back window had blood on it and the vehicle in front of us, the driver started fighting with the law enforcement and it was one young cop came back there and he was wanting to get in on the fight. One other cop and he looked at the license and didn’t even look in the back of our truck. We drove on through the roadblock. We’d have been in jail that night for sure.

Ramsey Russell: You find yourself in a situation and I’m going back to North Dakota. Now you’re out there working undercover with an operator that is exceeding the limit on a grand scale. How do you not –

Kennie Prince: That’s been a question to ask. Well, you were violating the law, too. I said, I’m just shooting up in there. He don’t know whether I’m hitting that or not.

Ramsey Russell: He just thinks you’re a terrible shot.

Kennie Prince: He just gave. Everybody loves to be better than the guy standing beside him. I mean, I just, everybody wants – And they’d even tell me, man, you made a good shot which they knew they shot the duck because I was, they knew they killed it, but they were letting me claim it, more or less. Because they were like, well, I didn’t hit him. They just wanted to keep shooting more ducks.

Ramsey Russell: What do you think about that group shooting like that? There might be 6 or 7 of you blind shooting in aggregate and there may be a guy that’s a terrible shot. There’s a guy that’s killing them all. What do you think about something like that, from a law enforcement standpoint?

Kennie Prince: Well, the laws state that you can’t do a bag together. Everybody’s supposed to keep their ducks separate.

Ramsey Russell: Well, that’s what it says, but nobody does it. How could –

Kennie Prince: Well, when we checked them, they better have separated.

Ramsey Russell: Separated.

Kennie Prince: We would make them separate them out. Now there’s no wave, if you got 200 shooting and you got a group of ducks come over, you may both shoot at the same duck.

Ramsey Russell: But when a dog brings back, you just. That’s when you said –

Kennie Prince: Somebody’s got to claim it. Either you claim it, I claim it or somebody else will claim it. But somebody’s got to claim the duck. So, I mean, that’s where it just comes down to. You got to be honorable enough to say, okay, you take that one, I’ll take the next one. If we both shoot.

Worst State for Game Bird Violations

They actually beat us again, but they were videoing the hunt and when we seized the video, I could tell somebody knew there was something on that tape they didn’t want us to see.

Ramsey Russell: Was North Dakota the worst migratory game bird violations you were ever a part of?

Kennie Prince: As far as undercover, it was. That was probably the worst one. As far as numbers killed. One other case we made, just working plain clothes. We had some guys that we’d been after them for quite a while and when we did catch them, we didn’t have them like we thought we had them. They actually beat us again, but they were videoing the hunt and when we seized the video, I could tell somebody knew there was something on that tape they didn’t want us to see.

Ramsey Russell: What was he doing?

Kennie Prince: Oh, they had several days documented how many ducks they killed, everybody standing behind them, even one of the main guy’s wife said, oh, I’m glad the game warden didn’t check you all today. I forgot how many ducks they had there, but it was a pile.

Ramsey Russell: Wow, was that in the state of Mississippi?

Kennie Prince: Yeah, that was in Mississippi.

Ramsey Russell: Were they probably hunting over bait?

Kennie Prince: They weren’t hunting over bait that day, but they were definitely double tripping. And just what they do, shoot the limit. Somebody would take them out, they’d come back, shoot another limit.

Ramsey Russell: Just keep it up.

Kennie Prince: Just keep shooting till they got tired of shooting.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t think it was cold storage you were talking about, but it was it was kind of a similar sound and story, but it involved paddlefish. That was a really great story. And to me, reading the chapter of, kind of a scary bunch of guys to be around.

Kennie Prince: Yeah. When you’re dealing with the paddlefish market in Mississippi, at the time when I was working, it was totally closed. You couldn’t take paddlefish with a net. And the black market caviar was running around $25 to $30 a pound. And I actually pushed for them to legalize it in Mississippi because we had people from out of state coming in, taking our paddlefish and our guys were having to do it illegally. I always have a side for the commercial people out there, because, I mean, if we got a resource, let’s don’t just let people rob it. Our state needs to benefit from it. And they do have a paddlefish season now, but we had a lot of people that were taking them illegally, selling them on the black market. It’s a different group of people and –

Ramsey Russell: Different how?

Kennie Prince: Well, when I say different group, not all of them were that way, but I would say 30% of them I dealt with were drug users as well. Now, that was just some of the ones I dealt with. And normally, people that would break the law to a certain degree will just go that much further on other things. They just type of people they were, they lived on that type of lifestyle. But I know one individual that probably introduced me to the paddlefish market. It took beavers to get to know him. I saw him skinning beavers one day out behind the house and I just stopped and started talking to them about beavers.

Ramsey Russell: Really? So you just drive them down the road and see somebody skin them beavers?

Kennie Prince: Yeah, I stopped, so I helped them skin their beavers. Then we started doing some beaver stuff together, which I already knew from a local officer had told me, those guys are out catching paddlefish. So after getting to know them through the beaver market, through the fur market and this was an Operation Cold Storage, this was a different case, but I was able to start doing a little more with them. Before long, I used myself as a middleman to introduce them to somebody that bought paddlefish eggs. And in doing that, I was going out headlighting with them at night. We were shooting deer, rabbits. I was buying crack with them, going into crack houses. That was probably the only time I ever got a little scared was one night we went to a place, didn’t have any electricity. The only light in the place was BIC lighters.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, smoke and crack.

Kennie Prince: Smoke and crack. In a trailer house on the side of a Delta field that looked like a band, another and about 20 cars outside. We had to count rocks of cocaine on the floor with a BIC lighter.

Ramsey Russell: Did you conceal carry?

Kennie Prince: No, most of the time I didn’t have a gun on me. That night I put one. I kept one under the seat. I had a little 38 that I dropped in my coat pocket when we went into –

Ramsey Russell: Talk about beating that guy. You all had been to a bar or something and he needed a ride home. Now this is the guy you helped skin beavers?

Kennie Prince: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Kennie Prince: Well, it was amazing. The first night I went in the bar, there was a sign on a house that had a Budweiser on it. He told me to meet him at the bar. And anyway, I’m like, surely that can’t be the bar.

Ramsey Russell: The bar was a house.

Kennie Prince: The bar was a house. When I pulled up to it, it was several vehicles behind it. But he kept telling everybody about how much he said, man, I love this guy this much, which he was holding his hands out and I couldn’t quite understand what he’s talking about, which we’d already talked about paddlefish. And when I found out he was letting other guys know he was talking about paddlefish by holding. He said, I love him this much.

Ramsey Russell: He’s introducing you into the inner sight. I love this much, holding his hands out wide, saying, paddlefish, wink, wink. Now you trust this guy.

Kennie Prince: Yeah. I didn’t know what he was talking about and so we –

Ramsey Russell: How long had and you known this guy and gotten in with him before he said, I trust this guy, paddlefish trust?

Kennie Prince: Probably about 4 or 5 months.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Kennie Prince: But now, we had been shooting deer at night, just, you name it. And I’ve been with him to buy crack cocaine 2 or 3 times. So, I mean, he trusted me, that much. So he would take me anywhere.

Ramsey Russell: What was it like walking in that trailer house full of crackheads? I ain’t never done that, nor do I want to, but that’s got to be pretty daunting.

Kennie Prince: I’ve done it once and wouldn’t want to do it again, I can tell you that. That was –

Ramsey Russell: Pretty desperate people.

Kennie Prince: Yeah. It was just plumb nasty is all I could say about it.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Kennie Prince: But I lived that way, too. I mean, I was always nasty just like they were.

Ramsey Russell: So what happened after the night of going to the crack house that led up to the arrest of these people?

Kennie Prince: Well, what we did after we actually started going with them to catch paddlefish, the same laws would have been applied if the game warden actually caught them. You understand what I’m talking about as far as they would have been charged. So instead of blowing their cover, we just let the game warden know exactly where the nets were. And the next day, the game warden caught them all at the boat with a fish. We knew where they were hiding their boats and everything else, so we put the local game warden on them and we just slipped out of the pitcher onto something else.

Ramsey Russell: See, I’m real interested in paddlefish because I knew nothing at all about them but that they’re kind of a catfish looking fish that’ll get on your trot line sometimes. I used to know people to catch them with a trot line by dipping their different little hot dogs and different little chunks of hot dogs in an Italian dress and put a film on the water and those fish could see it and they’d come up and swallow the hook, which I guess was legal because they would just trot lining and it tastes like a catfish.

Kennie Prince: Yeah, well, they’re filter feeders, actually. They just swim through. They’re eating plankton.

Ramsey Russell: They don’t have bones in them.

Kennie Prince: And they just, that’s the reason you’ll catch them like that, because they just swim along with their mouth open. But most of these are net fish. They set nets for them when they’re spawning in the spring.

Ramsey Russell: I worked briefly for US Fish & Wildlife Service up in north Mississippi, which is where this story took place thereabouts. And one of the biggest cases that year on that refuge was Refuge Law Enforcement just recognized a size trailer at the boat ramp that didn’t belong during duck season. He said, that’s just too big. There ain’t no way a duck hunter’s running up and down tip of a bayou with a boat that size. And he waited on them and they come in and they had a boatload of paddlefish and flew up on my radar when I stepped into the walk in cooler Monday morning to go get trees to plant and it’s knee deep in paddlefish. And that’s when I said, wow, is that one the caviar market. So they’re just out there netting these fish? They like to spawn on gravel bottoms I learned.

Kennie Prince: Most of the time what they would do is cut the eggs out on the water and the best way you could find out, if you looked in their boat, they probably wouldn’t have any paddlefish, but they would have a screen. If you ever saw a screen in their boat looked like a screen, door screen, they would push the eggs through them. As soon as they got them out of the fish, trying to get the fat off the eggs, they’d have a bucket they would put the eggs in and then they’d bring them back home and they had a process they would go through, getting them good enough to market them and a lot of them would run them in through, wash them in pantyhose, like women’s stockings.

Ramsey Russell: Washing like tap water or something.

Kennie Prince: Yeah. And when they were soft they make them tougher?

Ramsey Russell: Where do they go from gravel bottom creeks and rivers in Mississippi? Where does paddlefish row go from there to be sold as caviar?

Kennie Prince: It goes all the way, generally leave Mississippi, all the southern states or wherever paddlefish are called, all up and down the Mississippi river. But they would generally go out of New York to Russia. Back to New York.

Ramsey Russell: You are kidding.

Kennie Prince: No. They’d be canned in Russia and –

Ramsey Russell: And sold as legitimate caviar. Wow. Holy cow. What is something like that worth to a guy? I know like, I’m just saying like one time, I’ve hunted ducks up around the Caspian Sea, where all the beluga is caught and the stores right there, snuff can size of salty tasting fish eggs, I would call it, is about $300, unless you go back behind the nuts and candy, knock on the little door and go into a little walk in closet and buy it direct. Now you can get it for a $100. What are we talking about for paddlefish eggs?

Kennie Prince: It’s about, I want to think $300 or $400 a 10, which was, I think, 2oz. But they, the Russian sturgeon was your main caviar market and they sell paddlefish now. I mean, it’s sold as paddlefish eggs, but I think a lot of paddlefish get mixed in because the Russian sturgeon is just about extinct at one time.

Ramsey Russell: Ain’t that something?

Kennie Prince: I mean, they were protected.

Federal Game Violations

And it just steps right on up, all the way to Russia.

Ramsey Russell: SO when the game warden bought them, boy, caught them boys with the, you all went and kind of marked, told the game board where the nets were. They showed up, ambushed. The boys caught them. They didn’t have any idea who you were.

Kennie Prince: No.

Ramsey Russell: You just happened to be the guy that didn’t show up that day.

Kennie Prince: We had federal charges on some of them, but due to another ongoing investigation, we allowed that to just fall apart. And another group of investigators further north of me, I had been introducing some guys to them. They carried it a little further and we just continued to share with each other. And they actually picked up a bigger ring above us up north going toward New York.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a syndicate.

Kennie Prince: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And it just steps right on up, all the way to Russia.

Kennie Prince: There’s money there. There’s people there.

Ramsey Russell: What was besides the crack head, like, you go into a crack house, you’re dealing with it. Did you, there’s a lot of drugs trading hands or just being consumed a lot of these cases.

Kennie Prince: Most of the time it was consumption. We would do some purchasing for, just to add to the case that we had, if it was offered, we wouldn’t go out looking for it. That wasn’t our target. Our target was wildlife. But a lot of times we had to buy drugs first before we buy the wildlife, to get in on that side of it.

Ramsey Russell: Had to kind of just get in and prove that you was criminal.

Kennie Prince: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And that made them crush you.

Kennie Prince: Or we had people that would pat us down when we would come in for a time or two. They’d always act like they’re hugging you, but they’d rub you all real good, squeeze you real tight, trying to make sure you weren’t wearing a wire.

Ramsey Russell: Did you wear a wire?

Kennie Prince: No, not on the first contact.

Ramsey Russell: When would you start wearing a wire?

Kennie Prince: The only time that I wore an actual wire that was a transmitter would be like on a by bus situation where there were agents listening and they were going to take us down once the deal was done. Otherwise, we would be, we were always alone for the most part. When I say we, it may be me or me and one other guy, depending on what we were working. But in Mississippi, at the most we ever had was 4 undercover agents.

Ramsey Russell: But there might be somebody listening on wiring. And I guess when the cavalry come up and arrested everybody, you was cuffed and put in back of recruiter just like they were.

Kennie Prince: Just like everybody else.

The Carrollton Zoo Case

He had seen where somebody been offering a turtle on the Internet for sale. Alligator snapping turtle, which is illegal to do in Mississippi.

Ramsey Russell: Looked just like everybody else. I think one of the most interesting stories and I told somebody about this other day was the Carrollton Zoo. And they go, what’s the Carrollton Zoo? I said, well, you got to listen to this episode here about this. God, never heard of it either. Carrollton’s a tiny little old hamlet up in the hills, Carroll County.

Kennie Prince: That’s not actually where it’s at. Names are changing a lot of places, but that turned out to be a place where we started investigation in Mississippi, Robert Olivera actually called me about it. He had seen where somebody been offering a turtle on the Internet for sale. Alligator snapping turtle, which is illegal to do in Mississippi. And I did. At that time, I had nothing to do with Internet, so it was still new in my life. But I told Bob, I said, look, I don’t want to fool with something on the Internet. But anyway, he gave me a number and I called the guy up and just blowing smoke. Fortunately, I was able to find out who he had already sold the turtle to in Arkansas. So I called that guy up and started telling him, I’m a contractor building a restaurant for a guy and he’s wanting a snapping turtle and he’s wanting to put it in there. Well, it turned out the guy was fixing to ship the turtle to China, which was the biggest market for turtles in the United States going to China. But the turtle wound up costing me $2,500 to buy, that’s on the pet trade. That’s a different market. This alligator snapper was a little over 100 pounds. Big turtle. But after I set up the deal with him, we do a by bust on him. We bound up getting three large alligator snapping turtles from him. And he had already gotten a biologist in Arkansas to tag him that he was fixing to ship them to China. He had told him he owned the alligator. I mean, he owned a turtle ranch. And he told them they were brood turtles that he had been raising turtles so he could sell them legally, but he was taking them from the wild, which generally happens with most of your turtle ranches. I shouldn’t say most of them, but the ones I dealt with, they were taking turtles from the wild and mixing them in with the ones they had raised on the ranch and selling them. So we turned that turtle around and we made several, what we call by busts. And we had dealt with this one particular little zoo with some exotic stuff in the past and we’d been in there. He had been charged before in another state, before he moved to Mississippi. He was involved in some black market stuff that we hadn’t been able to get down on. And I just said, well, let’s just see if he was interested in these turtles. And by checking with him, he said, oh, I’ll buy them. This right off the bat. I said, now, they’re illegal. Made it real clear. I said, I can’t afford to get caught with these turtles. I said, they’re illegal. I said, you can’t sell them in Mississippi. He said, I’ll buy them. I don’t care. He said, you ain’t got nothing to worry about down here. I said, okay. So we go and we do a by bust with him and it was sad to say, with all the illegal stuff he had, we did a search warrant and his place –

Ramsey Russell: Wait a minute. Let’s go. I want to hear this whole story now. So I got some turtles. They’re illegal, but if you want them, I got them. He’s like, bring them?

Kennie Prince: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: How much did he offer you for them? You got $2,500 in it?

Kennie Prince: I think I was selling them for around $150 a piece or something, I hope.

Ramsey Russell: I bet he did want them.

Kennie Prince: Well, the thing of it was, now you had a different market. Okay, see, this is staying in state. You’re looking at an international market with that bigger price. So anyway, with him, once we set up the deal and do a buy bust, I pull up with the turtles and I’m acting overly spooked. I want him to know everything about, I’m scared, we’re doing something very illegal here and I don’t want to get caught. I was giving him every opportunity to say no. I made it very clear. I don’t want any problem with it.

Ramsey Russell: It was a recorded conversation.

Kennie Prince: Yes, everything’s being recorded. Plus, I was wearing a wire, there were agents listening and he said, man, you ain’t got nothing to worry about right here. He said, nobody’s going to bother me. So, well, after we do the deal, we start unloading the turtles. Money’s transferred and I give the signal for them to come in. They get us, charge us both or arrest us both. And then they follow up with a search warrant on his residence too. They seized a lot more illegal items from him.

Ramsey Russell: What all did he have in this little backyard zoo?

Kennie Prince: Well, he had all types of what we call resident animals, as far as, he had several predators, coyotes, fox, things like that.

Ramsey Russell: Bobcat.

Kennie Prince: Yeah. Had a lot of turtles that he shouldn’t have had. Had no permits to have. He didn’t have any kind of zoo permit at all, but he had all these live animals back there that he shouldn’t have had under Mississippi law. And after we went through all that with him, we showed up at court. I assume that’s what you want to get to the court part. We get to court.

Ramsey Russell: All these animals he had, I’m sure he had white tailed deer.

Kennie Prince: He didn’t have any white tailed deer.

Ramsey Russell: Were they all native wildlife indigenous to Mississippi caught from the wild. It sounded like –

Kennie Prince: Not everything he had. He had some exotic species, but he didn’t have permits for these animals. See, most all animals, you have to have some type of permit to keep any type of wild animal captive. So you got either a zoological permit, a permit from the Mississippi department of wildlife, some type of permit. You can’t just have, wild animals that may be protected somewhere else even. And he did. He had some big cats, lions, tigers, things like that.

Ramsey Russell: So you’re in some tiny little community in the state of Mississippi. It was not, in fact, the actual town of Carrollton. And you go to court and you got this guy, man. I mean, you got him on recordings. You sold him turtles, you got the transaction, you’ve done a search and seizure. What was his wife’s demeanor when all this was going on, when he was getting arrested?

Kennie Prince: It wasn’t very good. They had to pretty much hold her down and threaten to take her to jail, too, but she finally calmed down. But once we got to court, the first judge dismissed all the charges, just more or less, no, I’m not going to prosecute this. But by him dismissing the charges –

Ramsey Russell: Was it being prosecuted at the state level or federal?

Kennie Prince: State level, yeah. It was going to be prosecuted at the state level. And the reason it had to be prosecuted there, the turtles, actually originated in Mississippi, even though they’d been to Arkansas. The federal government said, since they actually are residents of Mississippi, it wasn’t a Lacey Act. It was where they would cross the state line even though they’d been to Arkansas and came back, which I didn’t like that much because I knew we were going to be fighting uphill, battling state court. And, well, county court, once we get into court in the county and this first judge dismisses all the charges, well, being the hard head I was, I went back there and filed affidavits on all the charges again and refiled them.

How are Migratory Game Bird Violations Prosecuted?

They went to a federal magistrate a lot of cases because to avoid any kind of local level conflict of interest.

Ramsey Russell: You talk about running it in county or state court versus federal government, like, I know, in the state of Mississippi and I presume everywhere else or a lot of other places, migratory game bird violation, doves, ducks, whatever, are automatically prosecuted federally.

Kennie Prince: Not always.

Ramsey Russell: Not always. They went to a federal magistrate a lot of cases because to avoid any kind of local level conflict of interest.

Kennie Prince: And that’s a problem. And especially in rural areas, most of those positions are elected positions. And if –

Ramsey Russell: Go to church with them, go to rotary clubs with them.

Kennie Prince: Everybody knows everybody. And it can cause an issue especially for your local officers, which we had the local officers involved in this. But once we went back, I refiled all the affidavits against the man and we go back to court again. He got a different lawyer this time. Our prosecutor did not want to prosecute. He wouldn’t even meet with us before court, to go over the case. I mean, he would not. We called him. He wouldn’t even meet with us at all. So we go through this rigmarole with him and can’t get anything done or when we show up for court, the daggum prosecutor is over there talking with the defense attorney, laughing and cutting up and he’s playing with the judge’s gavel. The judge and him is arguing over the gavel. He’s trying to start court. I’m thinking, this is the biggest circus I ever been in in my life. So we had probably 8 or 10 uniformed officers there. The judge was somebody they had assigned for the case. He’s sitting there. And they went through a few rounds in the court and he was about ready to dismiss it. And I forgot how it got brought up, but we had to recess for something. And I told one of the officers there, I said, let’s go see the mayor. That’s what it was. They were going to call the zoo, the city zoo. That’s what the defense attorneys were saying. The city owned it and we couldn’t charge that individual. And so when we broke there for a little recess, I went to see the mayor and he saw me and I asked him, I said, is this your city zoo? I said, if it is, I want to see you all’s paperwork. And he said, it is not a city zoo. I said, can I have that in writing? He said, I will be glad to. So he got his secretary in there, he typed up a letter and signed it, saying, that is not we, the city has nothing to do with this zoo.

Ramsey Russell: There’s a mayor, he didn’t want the city to have no liability, this circus.

Kennie Prince: So we went through that whole ordeal with him. And when I walked back in there, well, as me and the officer who I thought the world of, that officer was probably my biggest asset through all the undercover cases that would work because he led my search warrant team all the time and would recover all the evidence that were at house. But I happened to look at the letterhead and there were both the lawyer’s name as city attorneys that were representing this man. And when I walked in there, I asked the judge if I could show it to him and everybody objected, which I walked up there and handed it to him anyway. Well, the judge looked at it and I mean, he called the defense attorneys up there and they were hot. It got heated up real good. And just to add a little icing to the cake, I asked one of the officers, I said, you all do have the news crew on the way, don’t you? And they said, yeah, they’re on their way. They said they’d be here in about 5 minutes. So court got adjourned and I think he wound up getting charged with 2 or 3 charges and then he found he wound up suing us. I think we stayed in court for almost 7 years before it was all dissolved. Nothing ever came of it from that point. Wow, he did get found guilty on a few of the charges.

Ramsey Russell: What’s different about the zoo case that you did go to court and kind of lead it versus some of the other ones that you just faded into the end?

Kennie Prince: Well, being a by bust and him contesting it, if they contested stuff, you would have to go to court. Most of the time we would have so much overwhelming evidence, they wouldn’t want to go to court.

Ramsey Russell: Could you have done something differently in hindsight, course, hindsight, 2020. Could you have done something differently other than just handing him them turtles and walking away? Could you have done, gone deeper, gone longer, done something with him like you did with some of these other cases to build a better case where he just played.

Kennie Prince: We had so much on that guy. He should have never been. It was just court.

Ramsey Russell: But the local politics just got too deep.

Kennie Prince: That was all it was.

Ramsey Russell: Ain’t that something?

Kennie Prince: If it had been anywhere else, there would have never been anything to it. But just being where it was, that caused the problem. And that can happen in any rural county.

Ramsey Russell: Kennie, you’ve obviously got a good way with people because you’re dealing with all sorts of folks all the time. You’re building friendships, you’re building cases, you’re working with a good size, the good guys on this side, building a case through law enforcement, all the way up through the legal system to include warrants and judges and all this good stuff. And then you’re dealing with folks out there spotlighting and going to crack houses and gutting paddlefish to go to Russia. I mean, that’s a lot of different people. You got a lot of skill set. We talked a little bit about how you just kind of blend in and are able to befriend people. Were there people in your career that you were just really glad to get off the streets? Like, almost, you just didn’t even like them. You had to be their friend, but you absolutely just didn’t like that guy, but you had to pretend that way.

Kennie Prince: Oh, yeah, I would say that guy on that duck case that we talked about earlier.

Ramsey Russell: You just didn’t like it. He wasn’t a nice guy.

Kennie Prince: Well, he was an arrogant, foul mouth fella that thought he was – And he was a good duck shooter and duck caller. Duck killer, if you want to call it that. But he definitely wasn’t a sportsman.

Ramsey Russell: Didn’t sound like a very nice human being either.

Kennie Prince: He was all about himself.

Making the Tough Calls

Were there any people you ever had to put the cuffs on to bring a case against that you just deeply regretted?

Ramsey Russell: Were there any people you ever had to put the cuffs on to bring a case against that you just deeply regretted? I mean, it’s like, dang, I really like that guy. And he just, with all these situations.

Kennie Prince: Yeah, the guy on that big case, the first one we talked about, the one that led us to the guys in New Orleans, I wound up going headlighting with him and he was probably one of the best headlights I’ve ever been with.

Ramsey Russell: I got to ask this question. Since you said that headlight is headlighting, ain’t it? What’s the difference?

Kennie Prince: There’s good ones in there.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you got light better or what?

Kennie Prince: What I call your road runners drinking beer and shooting something standing on the side of the road? This guy was making money and he –

Ramsey Russell: Was selling deer material.

Kennie Prince: Deer meat.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Kennie Prince: And he wouldn’t shoot a big deer. He was smart enough to say, if I can’t run with it, I’m not going to shoot it. He would shoot mainly yearlings and things like that and he wouldn’t get greedy.

Ramsey Russell: He was a professional spot lighter.

Kennie Prince: He would shoot 2 or 3, hide them, hide his gun, then go walk back down the road till his buddy picked him up. And then –

Ramsey Russell: What made him so likable, Kennie?

Kennie Prince: He had a good personality, is it. I mean I had to say he was just making a living. I hate to say it, he was just making a living. I mean and he was a convicted felon. Wasn’t supposed to be in possession of a firearm.

Ramsey Russell: Was he a good guy? When he became a felon, what was he doing that led to a felony reckon?

Kennie Prince: Armed robbery.

Ramsey Russell: Well, they said Clyde Barrow was a nice guy, too, like him.

Kennie Prince: But, I mean, I liked him. Every time. He had quit selling to me because I wasn’t paying enough and started selling to these other guys, which I didn’t need anymore. I had enough case on him, but we were trying to find out who we were selling to him. We turned out it was some meat people in New Orleans. But I’ll never forget that night, I told him I was in a blind. I need a little, I said, when are you going again? He said, well, we can go tonight if you want to go. I said, well, I’ll go with you. Well, that’s what I want to do, is document him and catch him actually headlighting to see if he would flip on these other guys. So we go and the agent out of Louisiana that was working with me on cold storage, he drops me and this boy off and we’re on federal property, which made it a lot worse. So we’re on federal property and we see a couple of deer. All we’re using is a regular 6 volt light with a 22 rifle.

Ramsey Russell: 22 rifle?

Kennie Prince: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. No high powered stuff here.

Kennie Prince: Well, I mean, we were legit to be coon hunting, now. If we got called, all we got to do is say we coon hunting. We ain’t got no dog. Dogs run off on a deer or something. And the first 3 deer, we came up on a doe with 2 yearlings and he dropped both the yearlings. I mean, pow, pow and both of them hit the –

Ramsey Russell: Headshot, was he a head shot?

Kennie Prince: Yeah. Everything’s in the head. He didn’t mess up any meat. And we gutted him drug him out to the road. I missed one. He laughed. He had a good laugh at that. And then we’re going down. He shoots another one and hours had gone by, so we meet up with our other agent. He’s driving the truck and when we’re coming out, which this was a setup deal. So we had federal agents and state officers. Only one officer knew who we were, so the other guys weren’t aware. They just knew they had a headlight possibility going on that night and so the agent from Louisiana, after they stopped us, which he’s wanting to run, my guy is. He’s sitting between us and I tell him to give me the gun, because I’m trying to get the gun out of his hands. And anyway, they stop us, get us all handcuffed and they put me in a separate vehicle. And the agent from Louisiana goes up beside this boy and I say, boy, he was probably in his 30s and he tells him, that he’s an undercover, I won’t talk. So they’re taking me on to jail. They get me out of there and they talk to him for just a little bit. He would never give up who I was.

Ramsey Russell: He was a good guy.

Kennie Prince: He never said a word who I was. They kept asking questions about me to continue with my cover and he never gave me up. But he did give up to other guys who he was selling to.

Ramsey Russell: You all were friends?

Kennie Prince: Oh, we were. So the next day, we meet up and I see him sitting in his truck out in the parking lot and the boy from Louisiana said, you sure you want to do this? I said, yeah. I said, I’ll go up there and I walked up to him and he’s just staring at me when I walked up and I said, I guess, you know, I’m one of them, too. He just shook his head. But I looked on the console of his truck and he had a Bible laying there. And I just asked him, I said, you believe what’s in that Bible? He said, Yeah. I said, we ain’t going to have no problems then. He said, no. I looked at the guy from Louisiana. I waved at him. I got in the truck with him and we drove off and until then nothing ever happened. He said, he messed up. So we went on probably for the next 3 months, just like nothing ever happened and went from there.

Ramsey Russell: What would all these cases you made in 15 years of undercover? Did the age of people run the gamut? Because I started off this podcast talking about we were all young and dumb. But were all your people young and dumb or were some of them older in career and lifetime invested in this?

Kennie Prince: Well, we weren’t after the young and dumb ones. I mean, technically, most of the time, you catch the young dumb ones. I don’t mean it in a bad way.

Ramsey Russell: Kind of like the ducks in North Dakota.

Kennie Prince: Yeah, I mean eventually you go on trip up, either get caught or your friends going to get caught, you’ll stop. But we were after more the criminals.

Ramsey Russell: So that put them in an older category.

Kennie Prince: Yeah. Normally they’re going to be in their 30s and older.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And they’ve been doing this a whole long time. Did a lot of these folks seem not to need the money or would you say a lot of them were poor on a socioeconomic scale and maybe even just really just feeding a family with only skill set they had?

Kennie Prince: You had several different categories there. You had people that I would say were using money strictly to buy drugs with.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Kennie Prince: You had that kind of people –

Ramsey Russell: Have fun –

Kennie Prince: Obviously, that’s the way you could tell what kind of deer you were buying. If he’d say, you deer for $25 or $35, then he’s probably buying crack cocaine.

Ramsey Russell: Well, how much should a deer go for?

Kennie Prince: A guy that was doing it, quote, professionally, he was going to run anywhere from $50 to $75 a deer.

Ramsey Russell: I see.

Kennie Prince: He would take care of the meat. It wouldn’t be some old buck shot up thing that got drugged behind the car half way down the –

Ramsey Russell: Well, how far $25 to get you on a drug habit of crack cocaine habit. How far to get you know?

Kennie Prince: Well, back then that was generally what a rock was running was about $25.

Ramsey Russell: One hit

Kennie Prince: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Kennie Prince: So that’s where you could kind of see the scale of what type of person you were dealing with was by how much they sold their game for.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be dying.

Kennie Prince: And then you had commercial fishermen that were, I mean, that was part of the business.

How to Set Up a Sting Operation on Illegal Hunting

We would generally have audio and video, always audio.

Ramsey Russell: What kind of you had, you were wired up a lot of times on a buying bust on some of these longer cases because, of course, now, technology being what it is you can hide a little old camera anywhere, but, what was some of the – what was it like back in those days, building these cases? Was your word good enough to just document it? This what I saw as a sworn agent or did you have to have audio and video for a lot of stuff?

Kennie Prince: We would generally have audio and video, always audio.

Ramsey Russell: How in the world would you do that?

Kennie Prince: Well, I mean, they had cameras – I mean, the cameras, we normally had them hardwired, either in the toolbox or ice chest or deep freezes in the back of the truck where you couldn’t see them, I mean, we’d turn them on before we got there and preface them as far as what we were doing, who we were meeting, what we were fixing to do and then it would all be audio and video taped as well. And we would have little recorders on us that either fitting a button or something that would be audio recording what we were doing.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about, let’s just lead into your last and final case, because that was pretty involved and we can talk about how, what led you – What was the name of that case first off?

Kennie Prince: Operation Stone Duck.

Ramsey Russell: Stone Duck. Was it a duck hunting case?

Kennie Prince: Well, it had a lot to do with ducks from the beginning of it and one of the officers had told me about some individuals doing some stuff. He had been leading into it a good bit for several years, but he never would give us the names. He said he didn’t know their names. Found out later he died.

Ramsey Russell: State or federal.

Kennie Prince: It was a state case to start with and some of it turned federal later, but he actually knew who they were. But he just kept. It was almost like he was telling me enough just to tell me stuff, but he never would tell everything, as we found out later. But in doing so, I had 3 different guys working under me at the time. So we all started coming in at a different angle. I owned a place.

Ramsey Russell: Coming at the game board from a different angle?

Kennie Prince: No, no.

Ramsey Russell: Coming at the case.

Kennie Prince: At the case from a different angle.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Kennie Prince: And that way, what you’re doing is trying to open the door for, if this officer, somebody doesn’t like him, he can get out of the picture.

Ramsey Russell: I see.

Kennie Prince: This undercover agent, somebody doesn’t like him –

Ramsey Russell: You got a lot of little people out there.

Kennie Prince: Yeah, I have got several people working from different angles. Yeah, they know each other, but they’re not really that tight. And I was the center of the thing because I owned a place. I owned a house trailer where everybody would come hang out and do things and that kind of just gave us open door. It’s amazing how when people are doing illegal things, other illegal people catch on to it.

Ramsey Russell: Birds with a feather.

Kennie Prince: And they actually would bring deer by my trailer and drop asking me if they could leave them hanging.

Ramsey Russell: So you were living in Rankin county at the time still? you’re still in central Mississippi?

Kennie Prince: I lived in Rankin County, but I had a house trailer up in the Delta.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, in the Delta. Okay.

Kennie Prince: Yeah. That was all a covert deal as far as it was all wired with cameras and stuff as far as that went. So that opened the door for that case and it took a lot of time as far as working in to get into these individuals. And through some common, I guess you would say, people that we already knew from some other cases, it opened the door and it’s a small world. Everybody knows everybody.

Ramsey Russell: Did you have any stone cold duck? Stone duck.

Kennie Prince: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Stone duck? Okay, the game board and state game board gave you a little bit just to feed the fighter. And so you all start kind of digging around and running around some of these orbits. Did you know what that case exactly involved at the time?

Kennie Prince: At the beginning, it was the biggest thing was there was a lot of trophy deer being shot.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Kennie Prince: By this group also. It started off actually as 2 different investigations. We thought it was the same investigation. We were working teal hunting along the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the marsh area.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Kennie Prince: We thought was the same case. It eventually broke apart. It was 2 different groups, which we call them both. But the biggest part was when it turned into stone duck was when we started working the trophy deer hunters. We’re shooting a lot of trophy deer at night.

Ramsey Russell: How long did this case take?

Kennie Prince: Probably about a year and a half once we made contact, once we started getting in with them.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s talk about from the trailer house wired up, boy, you got just all kinds of folks. That’s prime breeding grounds for making cases, isn’t it? You got this house of narrow, well, attracting folks and it’s just rigged from end to end. Where was the break? How did it start? And the game warden said something, you all got this trailer, when did you start putting it together? And what led you to down to the Gulf Coast?

Kennie Prince: Well, once we got to know them just a little bit and started some introductions.

Ramsey Russell: Cause they were coming by the trailer house, too.

Kennie Prince: Yeah, they were doing a lot of hunting in the Delta on some national forest land and refuges up there, so it opened up more. So when, I hate to say it, everybody likes to brag in this world of killing big bucks or don’t they? All you had to do is say a little bit about, I’m killing this and the other one wants to kill something bigger and before long, you’re hunting together to do this same objective. And we started going with them and documenting headlighting and things like that at night. And it was just pretty much a ongoing show.

Ramsey Russell: How many people was involved?

Kennie Prince: Oh, I think it was 4 primary targets at the end on that case.

Ramsey Russell: They were all family related, friends, buddies, all of the same decades –

Kennie Prince: Friends somewhat related, yeah, there were some cousins involved.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Kennie, I appreciate you. Folks, I appreciate you all listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. But don’t go nowhere, it is fixing to get deep. You all are going to want to hear the rest of this story, I promise you. Tune in next week for part 2 of The Poacher’s Nightmare, see you next time.