Revisiting the Fulton Fish Market Shrimp King

As the Fulton Fish Market finally decamps for the Bronx, it's time to revisit by 2000 article from the Times on Donald Julich, aka the Shrimp King, now retired.

New Yorkers & Co.:
The Big Man in Shrimp
By DAN ACKMAN
07/02/00

YEARS ago, Donald Julich Sr. was eating lunch at Sweets, the famous South Street restaurant, now defunct, when a man came up behind him and said, "Excuse me, I understand you're the shrimp king of the Fulton Fish Market, and I'd like to shake your hand." The voice was familiar, and when Mr. Julich looked up, so was the face. Burt Lancaster was smiling at him.

"I'm happy to shake your hand," Mr. Julich recalls saying. "But as far as I'm concerned, you're the king. I'm just a peasant."

A king he may not be, but Donald Julich does have a throne, albeit a modest one, and a crown. The crown is Crown Fish Inc., his seafood business at the Fulton Fish Market. His throne is a bar stool on the sidewalk on South Street where for 52 years this square-shaped man with a hawkish face has presided over Crown Fish, buying shrimp and shellfish by day and negotiating with customers by night.

The Fulton Fish Market dates from 1869, when the first permanent building was erected on South Street. While fish that used to come in by boat is now trucked and flown in, the buying and selling continues as it has for decades. Fish is displayed in the open air on stands and in boxes that spill onto the sidewalk. Buyers and sellers meet face to face, without a fax machine or Internet connection in sight.

Mr. Julich, 70, the big man in shrimp, has witnessed as much of the market's history as any man alive. With the city considering plans to move the market to Hunts Point, in the Bronx, it is a history that may be coming to an end. Mr. Julich, though, is less concerned with history — "Don't put me down as an adviser to Abe Lincoln" — than with his part in what the city estimates is a billion-dollar industry.

His employees arrive about midnight to display the shrimp in sidewalk stalls. Mr. Julich shows up about 4 a.m., when the buyers start arriving.

On one recent morning, he faced off with a customer named John Kim, who owns a fish store in Queens. They spent a half hour haggling over a box of lobster tails. Mr. Kim wanted to pay $17.25 per pound. Mr. Julich held his ground at $17.50.

"Go on, get out of here," Mr. Julich said in an accent that betrayed his Newark roots. "Come back tomorrow and you'll pay $18 and feel lucky to get it." When Mr. Kim left, he said, "Don't worry, he'll be back." Sure enough, he was, an hour later. He paid $17.50 and groused when Mr. Julich told him he had just one box left to sell him.

Mr. Julich and Mr. Kim both finished with the deal, Mr. Julich's son, Donald Jr., marked the box with a black crayon and alerted a journeyman, as they are called, who grabbed the box with a cargo hook and hauled it to the parked trucks. In a concession to modernity, some of the journeymen use forklifts, which whiz by at a frightening pace.

By dawn, buyers are gone back to their stores and restaurants and Mr. Julich and his men are cleaning up and making calls to make sure that they have fish to sell the next morning.

Mr. Julich's father, Fred, once a restaurateur, started the family in this day-for-night existence in 1946. The son joined a year later after graduating from high school. In 1955, he took over the company, and the next year, his brother, Richard, joined him after a stint in the Navy. They worked as partners until Richard retired in 1992. When Donald sells his last shrimp, Crown Fish will go to his son and nephews, David and Richard, who joined in their late teens and who are now in their mid-30's. Dynasties of this sort are the norm on South Street, where businesses tend to stay in families for three and even four generations.

From the beginning, the Julichs specialized in shrimp, which has become "the No. 1 seafood item in the world today," Mr. Julich said. It is also, pound for pound, one of the most expensive, an important consideration in a business where sales space is at a premium.

OVER the years, Mr. Julich has expanded the line to include oysters, clams, scallops and lobster tails. Crown Fish has never dealt in fish, though, and the company name remains a mystery. "Why he called it Crown Fish, I'll never know," Mr. Julich says. Asked how much shrimp he sells in a week, Mr. Julich says, "Ask the I.R.S." Mr. Julich doesn't look rich. But then maybe people who work in the dead of night surrounded by the smell of fresh fish rarely do.

Buying and selling small marine crustaceans may seem a simple thing, but it is not without complexity. The 15 to 20 varieties of shrimp Mr. Julich sells come not just from the southern United States but from a dozen countries in Central and South America, along with other types of shellfish from as far away as Australia. In addition to knowing from where to buy at a given time of year, Mr. Julich has to anticipate what size shrimp his customers may want.

One of the major changes on South Street is the emergence of Asians like John Kim as a buying force. Depending on which owner is doing the estimating, Koreans and Chinese make up 60 to 80 percent of the buyers. One thing hasn't changed: the market remains a man's world. Almost no women work there. "Would you want your girl to work with these animals, these gorillas?" he says.

Mr. Julich and his fellow merchants complain that margins have shrunk in recent years. Since 90 percent of his sales are on credit, it's crucial that he know his buyers and keep after them for payments. For that reason, he says he has many acquaintances in the business but just a few friends.

"If they're a friend and you have a problem, it's harder to fix it," he says.

While the Fulton market looks a lot as it always has, Mr. Julich has seen it, like other central markets, decline in importance in the industry. He says that more buyers buy direct from sellers at the piers, sidestepping the market. Mr. Julich acknowledges the change and doesn't begrudge it when the buyer is making a substantial order. But he shows some anger at dealers who sell mostly to wholesalers like him but will sell a single box of shrimp or a single bag of clams direct to a restaurant. "I know why they do it, but in the end they're hurting their own business," he says.

While the market may not be the hub it once was, Mr. Julich agrees with his friend Dan, a fellow merchant, who says that it still sets the tone for the whole country.

Dan would not give his last name. People at the market are circumspect, knowing as they do that nearly every writer who visits focuses on its supposed domination by the Mafia. Mr. Julich says he has never had a problem with organized crime and adds, as do most people interviewed there, that allegations of mob rule are way overblown.

"I've been here 50 years and I've gotten to know pretty much everybody," he says. At other times, though, he cautions, "Be careful what you say because people could get annoyed."

The city has announced it is considering moving the fish market to Hunts Point. To Mr. Julich, the move would be a disaster. "You can't have the market behind a locked gate where you need a badge to get in and out," he said. "Buyers have to be able to walk around and look at what they want. This is an open market." He concedes that conditions at the market are primitive, but insists that they are sanitary.

There used to be a half-dozen stalls specializing in shrimp at the Fulton Fish Market, Mr. Julich says. Now there are just two. Does that mean he is now the king, as Burt Lancaster said? "Well, Lancaster's dead, so maybe that moves me up a notch. But I'm still a peasant."