Wildlife Officials Stung by Gramm’s Political Arsenal : Government: Agents probing hunting practices in 1987 ran afoul of a senator. The issue still reverberates.

CAMBRIDGE, Md. —  Two special agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were flying on routine patrol over the scenic Chesapeake Bay one fall morning when they spotted huge piles of bait ringing a nearby pond below.

Immediately they suspected that local hunters were illegally trying to lure into shotgun range waterfowl from the nearby Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Hoping to catch them, the agents set up surveillance. For several days, they hid in tall marsh grass and waited for telltale pops of gunfire to pierce the crisp autumn air.

But much to their surprise, no one appeared. No shots were fired. And no arrests were ever made. Instead, the agents--and some of their superiors at the wildlife service--found themselves staring down the political barrel of Sen. Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican and avid sportsman who owns prime vacation land nearby.

How the investigation fell apart remains unclear. What happened next, however, provided the federal game officials a stern lesson in the perils of tangling with a member of Congress, particularly one with Gramm’s reputation for relentless pursuit.

It was a battle the government agents would not win: The surveillance operation ultimately was deemed a failure; the senator was given an official apology and the careers of several wildlife officials were tarnished. Not long after Gramm weighed in with complaints, one refuge manager was removed over the objections of his supervisors. Three other wildlife service employees were reassigned.

Although the surveillance occurred in 1987, the episode continues to reverberate today: The enforcement of modern-day game laws that govern the century-old tradition of waterfowl hunting on Maryland’s famed Eastern Shore has been relaxed and the presence of federal officers on these bucolic fields diminished.

Moreover, the incident provides insight into the operating style of 53-year-old William Philip Gramm, a candidate for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, and his willingness to wield political power on behalf of his friends. At least one of his fellow hunters--a prominent Washington lobbyist--later became a significant donor to Gramm’s campaigns and provided him with personal legal services.

It is not unusual for members of Congress to take a deep interest in matters involving their constituents or in federal agencies that they oversee. But in this case Gramm neither worked on behalf of anyone from Texas nor served on a committee overseeing fish and wildlife issues.

“I think [Gramm] takes an expansive view of his power and influence,” said Walter Dean Burnham, professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. “That is just the way he plays the game. In a sense, he likes to throw his weight around.”

Gramm and his adversaries remain at odds about the senator’s role in changing enforcement practices on the Eastern Shore.

“Money and power usually prevail in our system of government,” said William C. Ashe, a former Fish and Wildlife Service administrator who was transferred amid political pressure. “It may not be right, but that is the way it is.”

For his part, Gramm said in an interview that he had no intention of influencing the wildlife agency but sought only to relay the concerns of his neighbors. He said law enforcement officials had targeted him because he criticized management of the refuge.

“Obviously,” he said, “someone was out to get me.”

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The bay that spawned the confrontation between Gramm and the Fish and Wildlife Service--the Chesapeake--is the nation’s largest estuary, an environmentally fragile playground that stretches from northeast of Baltimore to southeast of Richmond, Va. The area in Dorchester County, Md., along the Eastern Shore, particularly the segment near the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, ranks among the nation’s most desirable locations for waterfowl hunting. President Clinton and retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf are among the many celebrities who have hunted in the region.

A two-hour drive from the nation’s capital, the Eastern Shore also provides a convenient anteroom for lobbyists and members of Congress, who have hatched many deals during weekend hunting excursions. Many wealthy residents also lease or own property on the outskirts of the Blackwater refuge to run private hunting clubs stocked with tens of thousands of captive-bred mallards.

These state-licensed regulated shooting areas permit landowners to hunt without having to observe daily limits and other federal restrictions. Sometimes, in the zeal to maximize their harvest during an abbreviated stay, local hunters and their guests run afoul of game laws. This is most commonly done by distributing grain on the ground and then shooting wild birds as they come to feed--a practice known as baiting--or by using the mallards as live decoys.

One Fish and Wildlife Service agent recalled watching prominent Washington lobbyist Thomas H. Boggs Jr. and 20 of his friends kill 181 ducks in 45 minutes. Boggs later paid a $4,000 fine for hunting illegally over bait in the 1993 incident.

“The big shooting areas are set up to entertain clients,” said one officer, a veteran of more than two decades who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They don’t want to sit out in a duck blind and freeze their butts off and swat mosquitoes like everyone else. They want to puff some feathers.”

Like many area residents, Gramm considers himself a defender of wildlife. He is a member of the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus, a group of 247 legislators that strives to promote and preserve the traditional rights of American hunters. Gramm “has hunted all over America. He has never been cited for a violation of hunting laws and has never knowingly violated any hunting statute,” said Larry Neal, the senator’s spokesman.

In 1986, Gramm and his wife, Wendy, bought a vacation home on 35 acres of a remote section of the Eastern Shore known as Kirwan’s Neck. The property first caught the attention of Fish and Wildlife Service Special Agents George Lacey and Frank T. Kuncir in 1987 as they flew their routine patrol shortly before the Thanksgiving hunting season.

From the air, Lacey and Kuncir noticed an extraordinary amount of grain ringing a large pond in an open field--evidence of possible baiting.

On a follow-up visit, Kuncir said, he detected several hundred pounds of feed along with spent shotgun shells around a duck blind. “What I found at that site proved someone had been actively hunting it,” Kuncir said.

The landowner, Harold L. Whiteley, a local realtor and neighbor of Gramm’s, has been cited on at least one occasion for a hunting violation, records show.

Kuncir said he found another baited pond immediately next door on Gramm’s property. But unlike the Whiteley land, he saw no obvious signs that the Gramm blind had been freshly hunted. Gramm said he has never hunted on his property.

Believing the odds were strong that hunters would return at the height of duck season, Kuncir spent four mornings during Thanksgiving week hidden in wet marsh, monitoring both properties.

But for reasons that are not entirely clear, no one showed up.

Wildlife agents maintain that Gramm stayed away because he was warned of the investigation by then-Fish and Wildlife Service Director Frank Dunkle, who as a matter of policy had been apprised of the surveillance by agency officials.

Gramm told The Times he was never warned of the surveillance, but the agents’ claim is supported by Nathaniel P. Reed, a former Interior Department assistant secretary during the Richard Nixon and Gerald R. Ford administrations. Reed submitted sworn testimony to a congressional panel in 1989 that Dunkle told him Gramm was a “very useful senator” whom he had “tipped off” because he did not want to see him “embarrassed.”

Dunkle, who has since died, denied having any knowledge of the surveillance at the time--an assertion that even a top assistant to Dunkle called “unthinkable.”

That dispute has never been resolved. But the story of Gramm’s subsequent actions is clear.

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In August 1989, 21 months after the surveillance, Gramm demanded that John F. Turner, the new Fish and Wildlife Service director in the George Bush administration, launch an internal investigation into the episode. By then, materials key to the inquiry, such as photographs of the baited duck blinds, had disappeared under circumstances that agency officials find troubling.

“Somebody purged the files,” said James F. Gillett, the administrator who conducted the inquiry. It was “a very, very bad situation.”

How the materials disappeared remains unknown. Both sides in the dispute suggest that the other side would have benefited from the materials’ disappearance.

In the end, the inquiry concluded that neither Gramm nor federal agents had acted improperly. A top Interior Department official wrote to Gramm in 1993, expressing “regret that the unfortunate situation ever arose.”

But while the federal agents also were cleared, Kuncir was transferred out of the field office and saw his career placed under a cloud. Now a wildlife agent in Clovis, Calif., Kuncir charged that the internal investigation had simply been used to “exonerate the senator.”

“I looked at it, quite frankly, as an attempt to water down the incident.”

Kuncir was not the only wildlife officer to incur Gramm’s wrath.

Only four days after the surveillance operation ended in late 1987, Gramm summoned Dunkle to his Senate office for a meeting with J.D. Williams, a hunter who runs a private shooting club on the Eastern Shore and is chairman of Williams & Jensen, a large Washington lobbying firm. The purpose of the meeting, according to Owen Amber, a top Dunkle aide who attended, was to complain about the manager of the Blackwater refuge, Don Perkuchin.

With waterfowl populations declining, Perkuchin had begun cracking down on the practice of illegal baiting within a two-mile perimeter of the refuge. In the first year after his arrival, officers at the refuge issued more than 30 citations, compared to only a handful in earlier years, Perkuchin said.

Williams was among those who had been caught. At the meeting, he and Gramm complained to Dunkle about Perkuchin’s “arrogant” attitude and management of the refuge, according to Amber.

Two weeks after the meeting, Williams donated $1,000 to Gramm’s campaign--the first of a series of six $1,000 contributions from the lobbyist and his wife between 1987 and 1994, records show. In addition, Williams’ law firm assigned an attorney to solicit government approval for improvements that Gramm wanted on his vacation property.

Gramm said he only asked the attorney, George D. Baker, for advice to help fill out “a very simple form” to build a pond. But public records show that Baker worked extensively as Gramm’s agent with five government bodies between 1988 and 1991 in an effort to secure permits to dredge a canal and build a third pond on the senator’s estate.

Gramm indicated in an interview that he was not billed for Baker’s services. Later, however, spokesman Neal said the senator paid legal fees but refused to disclose the amount.

At the meeting with Dunkle and Williams, Gramm said he did not urge Perkuchin’s removal. “All I said to Dunkle was that people all over the county are up in arms over this guy,” Gramm recalled. “I told him this is something that ought to be looked into.”

But the meeting was not the only attempt by Gramm to put pressure on the refuge manager.

Within days, Gramm received an urgent letter from Richard F. Colburn, a Republican member of the Maryland Legislature, who complained about Perkuchin and informed the senator that the upcoming Grand National Waterfowl Celebrity Hunt could face cancellation if refuge officers restrained competitors from hunting in the regulated shooting areas.

The annual hunt, which attracts celebrities from around the world, is the largest and most prestigious sporting event held in Dorchester County. Gramm, who has since received Colburn’s endorsement for president, was given a yellow Labrador puppy named Gus in 1991 by the Grand National Waterfowl Hunt Club.

About a week after receiving Colburn’s letter, Gramm’s office contacted Dunkle to express further displeasure with Perkuchin, according to James C. Gritman, a retired aide to Dunkle who served as assistant director for refuges and wildlife. Gramm said he could not remember placing the call.

Then, a few months later, Dunkle told Ashe, the agency’s regional deputy director, that “the management of the refuge would go better if they had a change in the head of the operation down there,” Ashe recalled. Ashe and two other supervisors said in separate interviews that they refused to reassign Perkuchin because such a move would establish a dangerous precedent and lower morale.

“I felt that that wasn’t appropriate. This guy was one of the best managers we had in the region,” Ashe said.

But by midyear, Ashe and his supervisor, the regional director, were both reassigned. The “first order of business” for the region’s new administrators was to oust Perkuchin, said Don Young, the assistant regional director of refuges who carried out the transfer. In August of 1988, Perkuchin got a temporary assignment.

The removal of Perkuchin, who retired in 1992 after 32 years of service, wasn’t the only change that favored Eastern Shore hunters. Dunkle instructed agents to notify owners if bait was discovered on their land and restricted Blackwater officers to the refuge boundaries--an order that didn’t apply to the nation’s more than 500 other refuges. Because of budget cuts, the number of special agents patrolling more than 100 miles of shoreline has been reduced from five in 1982 to one.

Today, wildlife officers said they have learned a hard lesson from their encounters on the Eastern Shore. Said one agent, insisting on anonymity: “You don’t get any backing when you go up against the likes of a Phil Gramm.”

Times staff writer Dwight Morris contributed to this story.