CAVIAR CONS

When Russian caviar prices soared in the mid-2000s, a tiny town in the US Midwest experienced a clash of cultures, and laws

- David Gauvey Herbert

MIKE REYNOLDS WAS WORKING at Cody’s Bait and Tackle in rural Warsaw, Missouri, in the Ozark Mountains, when two Russian men entered the shop and began rifling through fishing poles that didn’t yet have price tags. Reynolds asked them to stop, but they ignored him.

Reynolds, then 57, had seen plenty of Russians come through the shop. He was tired of them poaching the town’s beloved paddlefish.

He removed a .40-caliber pistol from under the counter, chambered a round, and placed it on the counter. The two men looked up, backed out of the store, and never returned.

It was just another dustup in the long-running war between caviar-made Eastern Europeans, local fishermen, and state and federal agents that centres on this unlikely town and a very curious fish.

THE AMERICAN PADDLEFISH can weigh more than 160 pounds and measure seven feet long including its needle-nose snout. Paddlefish have another quality—their eggs taste quite a bit like Russian sevruga caviar. This curious fact explains why, in the mid-2000s, Russian immigrants began descending on tiny Warsaw (population 2,127), the paddlefish capital of the world.

For most of the 20th century, connoisseurs considered only the roe of beluga, Russian sturgeon, Persian sturgeon, and stellate sturgeon fit for making caviar. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, several factors, including poachers, decimated the Caspian Sea’s sturgeon population. Russia restricted commercial harvesting. Prices soared.