Agent Goes Undercover to Nab a Gang of Poachers

March 2, 2009 12:00 am

By Warren Cornwall The Seattle Times SEATTLE — The body count began the moment Tom Sharpe met Mick Gordon. When Sharpe stepped from his pickup, he found four men and a boy in the garage of Gordon’s Longview duplex stripping the skin from a big bull elk. Gordon retrieved a hunting dog Sharpe was thinking about buying, and they drove toward the woods to test the dog. Along the way, Gordon bragged that he killed lots of bears, cougars and bobcats. He shot four or five bull elk a year. A few months earlier he’d poached a big cougar. He and a buddy tossed dynamite into a creek to kill fish. Gordon declared that “he had poached everything there was to poach.” Shortly after midnight, they turned back, having killed nothing that day. But Gordon invited…