In Athens, Greece, while exploring how ships are stolen by maritime repo men and corrupt port officials, I came across the crew of the Sofia—ten desperate Filipinos, marooned on an asphalt tanker, anchored half a dozen miles from shore, and unpaid for over five months. While in the Gulf of Oman on a floating arms depot called the Seapol One, where private maritime security guards wait in international waters between deployments on ships, I heard from half a dozen guards whose employer had stopped taking their calls. Their ship had grown rancid and overrun with vermin.
