The ships had strict dress codes for staff, and the in-house laundering services functioned like an extortion racket, he explained. If you didn’t pay dues to a certain someone, parts of your uniform went missing or came back with mysterious stains on them, which would get you docked or reprimanded. Such black-market services and payoffs are standard fare in prisons, of course, and not quite what I had expected in floating laps of luxury.
