19 stolen sharks: How theft went down, as told by divers and the angler who lost his catch

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WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — John Moore Jr. held his tongue throughout the trial. He wasn’t a "shark hugger" or a sea hippie. He wasn’t an activist or a vigilante, either, no matter how many people online said otherwise. And he certainly wasn’t a felon.

He and Tanner Mansell, his crewmate-turned-codefendant, were shark divers — which was the worst thing they could’ve been on Aug. 10, 2020, when a photo of Moore hauling someone else’s longline onto a Jupiter, Florida, dock went viral. The line, pulled in from federal waters where it was meant to harvest sharks, wasn’t his to take.

The photo ruptured an already tenuous relationship between the local fishing and shark-diving industries and spurred a legal battle with Moore and Mansell at its center.

Scott Taylor, captain of the boat to which the longline belonged, said the value of the gear and lost sharks was nominal. It was the way the crew seemed to flaunt what they’d stolen, grinning with his monofilament heaped at their feet and earning praise online for rescuing sharks — his sharks — that he couldn’t let go.

With a phone call to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration investigator, Taylor helped push the debate from the internet to federal court. Let jurors decide whether Moore and Mansell intentionally sabotaged his harvest.

It was ridiculous, Moore said. The divers insisted they pulled the line ashore because they thought it was left in the water illegally, killing sharks indiscriminately. They thought they thwarted a crime, Mansell said. Taylor thought they unabashedly committed one.

The divers rejected the prosecutor's offer to plead guilty to a misdemeanor on the eve of trial, just like he'd rejected their own offer to send an apology letter and $10,000 to the fishermen they took from. They didn't approach the anglers again after that, on the advice of their attorneys, and didn't testify in their own defense, either.

"I never believed we would lose," Moore said. They did.

What's left now is a group of men who seem deflated. Neither the divers nor the fishermen are satisfied with the outcome, and all are worn down by a years-long barrage of vitriol from opposite sides. Tight-lipped for two years on the advice of attorneys, both have begun to tell their stories.

Each begins with the orange buoy.

The haul: 19 sharks, 2 goliath groupers, 3 miles of filament

The buoy bobbing 3 miles off the Jupiter Inlet looked like a diver in distress, 29-year-old Mansell said. Up close, Moore could tell it was something else: a fishing line with a lemon shark on its hook.

Whoever had cast it was long gone. There wasn't a boat in sight, and no high-flying flag or GPS beacon marking its place in the water — just the orange buoy, "ALBIE" written across it in faded black marker. Moore told the six tourists aboard his boat that he'd seen setups like these in Hawaii. Jug lines or "ghost sets," he called them, thrown overboard to kill the sharks that might otherwise steal a fisherman's catch.

Sharks are pesky that way. They're made even worse, Taylor said, by the divers who feed them to manufacture an up-close encounter for customers, regardless of the consequences.

The police chief and his family on the diving boat that day helped Moore and Mansell pull in the line for the next two hours, growing giddier and more incredulous with each great hammerhead and tiger shark that rose to the surface — 19 sharks in total, as well as two goliath groupers, which not even permitted fishermen can keep.

Moore cut each one loose. Take photos, he told his passengers. This was an ecological disaster they were helping to avert.

With several sharks freed and more still hooked, he called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission at 4:30 p.m. to report what they'd found. The officer hung up — he'd just seen a boat committing a slow-speed violation, he wrote later. The captain and his passengers continued pulling the longline on board.

FWC officer let longline sit on dock for hours, citing other duties

Moore returned to the Jupiter Inlet at 5:30 p.m., where he met FWC officer Barry Partelow, who he’d spoken to on the phone. He showed Partelow the 3 miles of fishing line heaped at the floor of the boat, 140 circle hooks, 140 longline clips, pink weights and all.

Partelow wrote in his incident report that he didn’t know what he was looking at, and he had patrol duties to attend to. He asked Moore to hold on to the longline, but Moore declined; he had another dive expedition beginning soon. 

The diver offered to leave the longline on the dock, and Partelow agreed. He would come back for it later.

Moore unloaded the longline, paving the way for what would become the viral photo. A local blogger snapped it and shared it to Instagram.

Mansell, still on the water and pulling in more of the longline by 6:30 p.m., paused when he saw a commercial fishing boat heading his way. Were they the ones who left the longline here? He called FWC.

Partelow's voice on the other end of the phone was firm: Let go of the line immediately. The longline owner, a fisherman named Richard Osburn, had realized his line was cut halfway through pulling it in. He reported it to NOAA, which ran his license number and confirmed the longline was there legally.

"I didn't know what to say," Mansell said. "My heart sank, and I'm like, 'What is going on?' I dropped it immediately, did my charter with guests and then I came back in, the whole time thinking: 'Did we make a mistake today?' "

Partelow returned for the line four hours after Moore left it on the dock, by which point passersby had picked it clean and loaded it into an empty dumpster at the order of the harbor master. The blogger's photo had spread from Instagram to Facebook, too, and the fury multiplied.

“Talk about digging your own grave,” one commenter wrote. “Better lawyer up quick,” and “All smiles till the feds come knocking.”

“What kind of bird doesn’t fly ....???? A JAIL BIRD .....!!!!”

“Thieves, plain and simple.”

Calls to law enforcement began hours before prosecutor said

The divers' ploy was obvious, Assistant U.S. State Attorney Thomas Watts-FitzGerald told the jury. Their livelihoods depend on sharks in the water, he said. Of course they freed them and made off with the longline.

Had they really believed they'd stumbled upon something illegal, they would have called law enforcement immediately, the prosecutor said — not two hours after they began pulling in the line.

Watts-FitzGerald didn't mention that Moore and Mansell's colleague, who was not on the boat that day, called the NOAA hotline within 30 minutes of the divers' discovery. NOAA investigator Benjamin Boots testified that in between calls with Mansell, the employee spoke to NOAA agents four times and sent two emails to an FWC officer.

Each time she got an officer on the phone, the employee urged them to meet the divers at the boat, Mansell said. No one did.

"We took matters into our own hands because sharks were dying," he said. "What are we going to do? Just let them die?"

That's exactly what they should have done, and would have done, Moore said, had they known what they do now: Six people in the U.S. are permitted to harvest sandbar sharks, and one of them lives on the Treasure Coast.

Jurors asked during their deliberation if they could see the call logs that would show the divers contacted law enforcement far earlier than the prosecutor said. They couldn't, U.S. Judge Donald Middlebrooks said, because no attorney admitted them into evidence.

"The evidence is not here, which means, for our purposes, it didn't happen," Watts-FitzGerald said during his closing argument.

Divers leave trial with felony convictions, debt

It took the jury three days to reach the same conclusion that fishermen needed one photo and a few foul-mouthed exchanges to arrive at: Moore and Mansell had broken the law, and they needed to pay for it.

Middlebrooks sentenced the divers to one year of probation and $3,345 owed in restitution to Taylor.

Months later, the jury's decision still baffles the divers' attorneys. Marc Seitles, who represented Moore, raises his voice every time he talks about it: Who the hell calls law enforcement to arrest themselves?

Mansell's attorney, Ian Goldstein, said the people he usually represents face extremely serious allegations. Moore and Mansell "made a mistake doing what they thought was right."

That narrative is exactly why Taylor, captain of the boat from which the longline was cast, pushed for the men to be prosecuted in the first place. Not only were they bald-faced criminals, he said, but they were celebrated for it — the divers who finally had the guts to stand up to NOAA-sanctioned shark fishing.

Moore and Mansell have long insisted that was never their intention, but some people online ran with it. A GoFundMe page launched in August praising the divers' concern for wildlife raised about $28,600 for the divers' legal fees. One launched for the fishermen raised about $4,500.

"They're heroes now, for standing up to what?" Taylor asked. "Science? Responsible harvesting?"

The shark population is growing. Without the handful of NOAA-permitted people each year to catch and kill them, the ecosystem gets thrown out of balance, he said, as it does with any protected species.

Taylor said the felony convictions are well deserved, but they're tainted — drowned out by the people online who have vilified him and Osburn for killing sharks and made heroes out of the men who saved them.

He doesn't see the threats lobbed at Moore and Mansell from the fishing community, only the praises given by the shark conservationists. The divers don't see the insults aimed at Taylor and Osburn, either. All are bruised. None feels like a hero.

Moore will never be allowed inside of Canada to visit his newborn granddaughter with a felony on his record. Mansell, who travels the globe to help rebuild shark populations in communities where shark finning has depleted it, can't do so without explaining his criminal record at every turn. Both have accrued thousands of dollars of debt in legal fees.

"When you try to do the right thing and get punished for it, you lose faith," Mansell said. "It doesn't make me want to be here anymore."

Elements of the case replay in his mind, like Watts-FitzGerald's offer to let the divers plead guilty to a misdemeanor. Maybe they should have considered it more seriously, Mansell said, like his attorney urged him to. Maybe the divers should have testified, or maybe they should have delayed the trial so another witness could, too.

Forget maybes, Taylor said. They should never have touched his line.

Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.