After a dramatic walleye weigh-in, Chase and Jacob’s winning streak comes to an end with a wake of unanswered questions. Big Time is an Apple Original podcast, produced by Piece of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.apple.co/BigTimePod
Chapter 1: What happened at the Lake Erie Walleye Trail Championship?
September 30th, 2022. Cleveland, Ohio. A gorgeous fall day on the shore of Lake Erie. Dozens of people are gathered in a park for the end of the Lake Erie Walleye Trail Championship. They're restless, agitated. Because the winning catch, Chase Kaminsky and Jacob Runyon's five walleye, well, those fish don't look right.
I knew that there was something wrong. That's Jason Fisher. He runs the tournament. He's inspecting those suspicious fish. He has his hands on one, and he feels something hard inside.
I'm like, oh, my God. There's typically not hard objects in the belly of a fish. I mean, they're not eating, you know, zebra mussels or, you know, rocks or whatever, turtles.
By now, everybody has their phone out, recording.
Chapter 2: How were Chase and Jacob caught cheating?
Jason cuts open the belly of the walleye.
We got weights and fish! There we go!
We got weights and fish.
Jason is holding up a small, oblong lead weight. Nobody is shocked because a lot of people already suspect Chase and Jake are cheaters.
And yet everybody is shocked because, holy hell, they stuffed a fish full of lead. So that's how they did it. Total chaos. It goes on for a while.
Go get that motherfucker! How you like it now?
On the scale, those fish weigh almost 34 pounds. Disemboweled, it's closer to 25 pounds. Inside the five total fish are seven pounds of lead and almost a pound of walleye fillets, which keep the lead weights from clanking around.
It's a clever touch. Clanking would totally give it away.
Everybody's recording the outrage and zooming in on the weights and the sad autopsy fish and zooming out to capture the bedlam.
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Chapter 3: What was the reaction of the fishing community to the cheating scandal?
Jake is all by himself.
Chase ran. He literally ran to his truck. I was running after him. It reminded me of a little teenage boy running to soccer practice. It's what he looked like. Yeah, he just went and hid in his truck.
That's Mike Miller, a veteran of the Lake Erie walleye tournaments. He's been suspicious of Chase and Jake since the previous season.
Obviously, there was an angry mob. He let Jake ride the whole thing out.
Jason did his best to keep Jake from getting pummeled.
He didn't run away. He didn't put a hoodie over his face and take off. He legitimately just stood there and took the wrath of the crowd.
There was so much wrath.
You know the irony?
They only needed 17 pounds of fish to win. They didn't need to cheat. About 100 miles to the west, in tiny Rossford, Ohio, Mayor Neal was not closely following the late-season walleye tournaments.
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Chapter 4: Who is involved in verifying the integrity of fishing tournaments?
Mayor Neal did not, at first, recognize the names or the faces.
You got to remember, everybody shows up with a baseball hat, bib overalls, dark sunglasses, and they're holding up fish.
But it didn't take long to make the connection. Those same two guys, Chase and Jake, had won the Rossford Walleye Roundup back in April. And they'd been accused of cheating, which meant that in the Rossford Walleye Roundup record books, there appeared to be a pretty big asterisk next to 2022.
I was bothered and hurt by what I thought would be the assault on the integrity of our walleye tournament. Then we really started from scratch. It hit me like a ton of bricks, because at the time, I thought it was so bizarre they wouldn't donate their fish. And then fast forward to that, when they got caught, I'm like, I know why they didn't donate their fish.
We got weights and fish! There we go!
Okay, pause. I have questions.
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Chapter 5: What are common cheating methods in fishing tournaments?
So many questions.
No, I mean a fundamental question. The cliche is all fishermen are liars, right? I mean, the internet knows this, and yet that went viral. Like, it was a shock to people.
Well, because it is. It's one thing to lie when there's nothing at stake. Every fisherman's got a story about the big one that got away, and ain't no way, no how anyone can prove him wrong. But here, the evidence just tumbled out in the most damning and humiliating and undeniable way possible. At this level of fishing, there's actually quite a bit at stake.
The day they got caught, Chase and Jake were about to walk away with more than $28,000 in prize money.
We're not talking about weekend tournament where you win 600 bucks. These tournaments that he was winning, I think in a year and a half, him and Jake were like over $300,000.
Mike Miller again.
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Chapter 6: How are polygraph tests used in fishing tournaments?
There's nowhere in the rules that say if you get caught cheating, you do 30 days in jail or it's a $20,000 fine. Just says the tournament director has his discretion to disqualify or deny entry to anybody that they want. To a criminal, I think it was a no brainer.
For a small-time crook, competitive fishing is a pretty good mark. Low risk, high reward.
Unless somebody cuts your fish open, and then there's proof. Heavy lead proof that you cheated to win $28,000, which is actually stealing. So, a lot of tournaments hire people like Stan Fulmer, a polygraph examiner.
People have to pay money to enter these tournaments. So if somebody cheats and wins a tournament by cheating, they have cheated all those individuals that entered. And once people cheat in tournaments, they don't want to come back and join that tournament again. And the tournament itself will dwindle and fall away.
Stan's been a polygraph examiner for 44 years.
I do tests pre-employment for police and sheriff's departments. I also do criminal cases for police and sheriff's departments. But I'm also an examiner for the Federal Defender's Office. So we do a lot of tests for the defense. We do tests on relationships, family relationships, family conflicts, business losses.
He's been told pretty much every kind of lie by every kind of liar.
I've done tests on people to cut people's heads off. And when he's not doing that, he's testing people who win fishing tournaments. All kinds of ways, various ways to cheat in a fishing tournament. We have caught people putting ice, stuffing ice. They stuffed a water hose in a giant big old fish one time. and filled it up with about 100 pounds of water.
When you're getting in and fish, you know, up to 500, 600, 1,000 pounds, they could do that.
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