Illustration by Neil Caudle 



Bill Lambert 



fast work of a loaded boat. 



"I took that cherry-picker right out of the woods 

 and adapted it for scallops," he says. "Now, you 

 can unload in one hour what it took ten people to 

 do in six or eight." 



It was such efficiency, he says, that turned the 

 scallop fishery around. Scalloping, once a sideline 

 people took up when shrimping was down, became 

 a year-round industry. 



"In nineteen-seventy-three, this industry was 

 worth sixteen-hundred dollars," Lambert says. 

 "Last year it was worth around forty million." 



His share of that figure? "Up until a year ago, we 

 were probably about seventy percent of the 

 American market," he says. "Now that all these 

 new people are in it, we're probably not over thirty- 

 five or forty percent." 



But Lambert hasn't made all that money 

 without also making enemies. Some accuse him of 

 pushing the limits of legality, and rumors surface 

 regularly that Bill Lambert is "being run out" of 

 one place or another. North Carolina fishermen 

 who don't work for Lambert complain that he has 

 deliberately locked them out of prime docking 

 space at Cape Canaveral. Floridians aren't happy 



about the fact that Lambert's work force is mostly 

 imported from the North Carolina pulpwood 

 industry — some of Lambert's key people have been 

 with him 25 years. And, competitors claim Lambert 

 has been manipulating the market — flooding it 

 with low-priced scallops to drive out rivals, then 

 holding frozen scallops off the market to wait for 

 higher prices. At least one new processing plant, 

 owned by a Japanese firm, failed when it stood in 

 against him. 



"They lost over a million dollars and went 

 bankrupt," Lambert says. "This is one time we 

 outdid the Japanese." 



He does have thousands of gallons of scallops 

 waiting in the deepfreeze, but Lambert denies that 

 he is out to force competition from the market- 

 place. "Really what I've done is open things up," 

 he says. "Eight years ago, it was hard to sell a 

 calico scallop because you couldn't supply them 

 through the year. I've worked through several dry 

 spells to keep them on the market, and I'm the only 

 man who's stuck with it through the years, good 

 times and bad. Now, I can take one machine and 

 support a dozen boats a-catching. There are new 

 processing plants all the time, where there used to 

 be just a few. So how can you say I'm locking peo- 

 ple out?" 



Lambert blames political opposition to his opera- 

 tions for the legal troubles he's been having with 

 the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. At issue is 

 Lambert's practice of piling empty scallop shells 

 into hills around his plants. Others have done the 

 same, but Lambert's plants have for years run into 

 trouble over the question of waste disposal. Even in 

 North Carolina, the issue helped nudge him off the 

 waterfront and inland to the Cape Carteret site. 

 There, he installed a machine to process wastewater 

 as it left the plant. 



In Florida, the Corps has determined that Lam- 

 bert's shells are jeopardizing wetlands. Lambert 

 says they don't, and the fight has taken him 

 through a series of court battles. 



Three times, judges have found in Lambert's 

 favor, and each time the decision has been ap- 

 pealed. 



"Every time they appeal it that way it costs me 

 about fifty thousand dollars," Lambert says. "I've 

 spent a quarter-of-a-million dollars on this fight." 



Lambert takes umbrage at all this heat from the 

 government, not only for business reasons, but be- 



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