It started as an American success story. The Easterday family took a couple hundred acres of farmland in southeast Washington and grew it into a farming and ranching empire worth millions. Then, it all came crashing down.
Ghost Herd tells the story of Cody Easterday, the man at the center of one of the largest cattle swindles in U.S. history. Easterday invented a “ghost herd” of 265,000 cattle that only existed on paper, and swindled companies including an agriculture giant to the tune of $244 million dollars. Correspondent Anna King has spent two years following the fallout of the crime and its impact on a tight-knit rural community.
Ghost Herd is a story of family and fraud, but also a story about the value of dirt and the shifting powers in the American West.
Listen to all episodes of Ghost Herd, and see behind-the-scenes extras at GhostHerd.org. Or search for Ghost Herd in your podcast app.
Ghost Herd is a joint production of KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio and Northwest Public Broadcasting, both members of the NPR Network.
Episode 1: The Empire Builders
Transcript:
911 Tape: State patrol 9 1 1. What’s the location of your emergency?
Anna King (narration): December 10th, 2020.
Uh, highway I-82 milepost 13 mile post 13. Okay.
At 3:30 p.m., in Pasco, Washington, a driver reports a major accident on the interstate.
911 Tape: Uh, I, I looked up and I saw the semi truck coming into the westbound lane.
Anna King (narration): The eastbound semi was hauling a trailer full of potatoes, a common load here in a region where agriculture is king.
911 Tape: sounds like it was a wrong way. Truck and, semi
Anna King (narration): The driver of the pickup truck had gone the wrong way up an off ramp. The semi tried to swerve out of the way but couldn’t, and slammed it head-on. The 79-year-old driver of the pick-up didn’t survive.
The tragedy of what happened that Thursday afternoon was all the more attention grabbing because of the man behind the wheel. A local legend. Gale Easterday.
Gale was the patriarch of a farming and ranching empire that sprawled across a vast basin by the Columbia River in southeast Washington state. Their operation was huge. If you’re a meat eater in the U.S. — and even as far as Japan — chances are good you’ve bitten into their beef. The Easterdays owned ranches … feedlots … vegetable farms … processing plants … restaurants … even a private plane.
And Gale’s death was the first public crack in the Easterday family facade. In the next few months, the family would appear in headlines again.
Here in this corner of southeast Washington state, deals are sealed with firm handshakes … and the power of your family’s reputation. The Easterday’s reputation was ironclad in this community. Which is why everyone was shocked by what came to light after that deadly crash on the interstate.
Cody Easterday — Gale’s youngest son, had been using the trust built off of his family’s good name to steal. A bigtime lie. He cheated Tyson Fresh Meats, and another big company, out of 244 million dollars. It was one of the largest cattle swindles in the history of the United States.
And Cody did it by inventing cattle. He made up fake invoices and billed expenses for a herd of hundreds of thousands of animals that only existed on paper … Just numbers on a spreadsheet. And this crime was made possible in part by the complexity and scale of our modern ag system.
Cody’s audacious lie was a fiction that was fed, gained weight and grew bigger over time. And when it toppled, all that his family had built over four generations fell with it, changing a farming community forever.
From KUOW in Seattle and Northwest Public Broadcasting, This is Ghost Herd … a story about a modern day cattle rustling, a family dynasty and the myths we tell ourselves about the West. I’m Anna King.
Rodeo Announcer: Welcome the Basin City freedom rodeo, 2022 and I got one question for each, everyone you folks out there this evening.
Are you ready?
Anna King (narration): Basin City’s population is a little over 1,000. It’s plunked right in southeast Washington state. It’s in Franklin County which produces more than half-a-billion-dollars worth of hay, corn, potatoes and other ag products. It’s all part of the heavily-farmed heart of what’s called the Columbia Basin.
This is the kind of place where workers grab tacos for a quick lunch. There’s also lots of steeples here — a Lutheran church, a spanish parish and a LDS chapel. Basin City’s tire shop carries big tractor tires. And the Columbia River rolls south, just outta town.
Rodeo Announcer: [national anthem Sound] Rodeo fans, let me hear you. I wanna know one thing,
Basin city, is this a cowboy town?
Anna King (narration): Basin City is a “cowboy town.” And as the popular Brooks & Dunn song goes, people wear their … “boots to dinner, drive [their] trucks to church.”
We’re at Basin City’s annual summer rodeo … About 25-hundred people drive in from all over for it each night.
And Basin City is the hometown seat of the Easterday family empire.
The Easterdays help put on this rodeo. Five of them sit on the committee. And Gale’s grandson — Cody’s son — even won the wild-cow milking contest.
Rodeo Announcer: Cutter Easterday!!!!!
Anna King (narration): Here, in the fertile Columbia Basin — with orchards, grapes and massive fields of crops — is where the Easterday family built their farming and ranching empire.
Gale Easterday’s father, Ervin, moved the family here in 1958. Gale would have been about 17 years old. The family moved here from Nampa, Idaho to 300 acres of undeveloped land.
Early on, Gale took right to farming, partly out of necessity, but partly for the love of the land. The farm’s company website says that a young Gale spent hours on a Caterpillar leveling and clearing this sagebrush in those early days.
Gale Easterday: They were always saying how farming was so hard. Farming was never hard to me.
Anna King (narration): That’s Gale Easterday from a video posted on Easterday Farm’s Facebook page. He said farming was never hard for him.
As Gale got older, he kept up the family operation and married a young woman named Karen.
Ben Casper: Gale and Karen were workers.
Anna King (narration): This is Ben Casper. Ben was Gale’s tire guy. Tires mean the world to a farming operation. Tractor tires don’t usually wear out in this country, they weather out — the sun and the rain and the cold beats on them. Ben owned that tire shop in Basin City and would often go up to the Easterday property to deliver tires or propane.
Ben Casper: And I’m telling you what, Karen was out there in her rubber boots and doctoring and feeding and taking care of a big, you don’t call ’em a herd, but a bunch of pigs all the time, they had a big operation there.
Anna King (narration): Ben says Gale had a reputation for loyalty to the people he knew. And not taking any B.S.
To see that in action, you don’t have to look farther than his spinnin’ tractor tires.
Ben tells me about a time the manager of a tire store in the Tri-Cities tried to take over the Easterday account, saying that the Easterday property was closer to his store.
Ben Casper: And I knew that was not a good idea because I knew Gale and I said, I don’t think you should do that.
That’s not a good idea. He said, no, it’ll be fine. He said, we’ll, we’ll just transfer it and we’ll take it over. No problem.
Anna King (narration): A few days later Ben’s phone rang. It was Gale.
Ben Casper: And I’m not gonna say everything he said, but it was essentially this: Ben, the last time I checked, this was still the United States of America. And I have the right, actually it was the blankety blank, right. To do whatever the blankety blank I wanna do. And if I wanna buy tires from somebody I’m gonna do it. And I don’t want somebody else coming on my place. Do you get that? And I, he was, he acted like he was really mad at me when he was saying, I want to keep the business with you.
Anna King (narration): After he hung up, Ben thought …
You know, Gale really is a loyal guy, but he’s not gonna have anybody tell him what to do.
Anna King (narration): You need that determination and grit to be a success in farming. Because in farming you can do everything right and still fail.
The best farmers tell me that they are just two bad years from losing it all. It just takes a market change, shipping problems, COVID, a long spell of drought or too much heat for it all to tumble. Much of it is out of the growers’ hands.
And in 1987 Gale and Karen had a bad year. So bad, they went bankrupt.
Gale made it clear in that Facebook video, that keeping the family in the farming business is what mattered to him.
Gale Easterday: my family’s done a big part of it. We lay it all on the line.. That’s the only thing making it work. Family. There’s no other reason to build it.
Anna King (narration): Family, there ain’t no other reason to build it.
It’s hard to know the impact of the bankruptcy on the family farm, but two years later in 1989, Gale’s teenage son Cody decides not to finish college so he can help his family farm. To help them build back from bankruptcy.
Ben Casper: Things really changed for Gale when Cody came along
Anna King (narration): Cody has been descibed as eager, driven, and a take-no-prisoners and get-all-you-can personality. He was forged in the Columbia Basin. A young man poised to take over the farming operation. He was ready to grow.
Cody’s sister says that her brother always wanted to farm even from very young. She describes how he would play with his mini tractors when he was a lil’ scraper — about three years old. He would plow little fields in his mother’s garden.
He had family land to start out with. And ambition.
From all accounts, Cody is a shrewd businessman. Ben Casper, the tire shop guy, watched as Cody took over more control of the Easterday operation. He says that Cody was just really aggressive…
