The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina

How can such a pervasive problem get so little public attention? One answer is that wage theft and seafarer abandonment are crimes of neglect. And no matter how intentional and cruelly calculated, this abuse represents a passive form of harm that, on its face, seems less violent.

After all, a Somali pirate with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher slung over his shoulder is more gripping than a faceless, nameless bureaucrat in some far-flung office who one day stops answering emails and turns off his cell phone. In both instances, though, the men left on the ship are hostages.

These ports offered variations of the same basic story over and over. Left in this liquid desert, the men were typically stuck on a ship that was officially in port, but in fact was only visible to but not reachable to shore, a couple miles from land. On the Falcon, for example, five men—from Sudan, Eritrea, and the Philippines—who were waiting to take diesel to Yemen were marooned when their ship was sold to a new owner who refused to pay them nine months of back wages.

Dubai saw a lot of seafarer abandonment cases because the price of oil had fallen from a peak of $130 a barrel in 2008 to $47 a barrel in July 2017, idling much of the oil industry’s marine traffic in the region. Labor unions were forbidden in most of the Gulf states in the Middle East, including in the U.A.E., making the mission’s work even more vital.

Some shipowners refused to pay salaries because they believed (sometimes rightly) that the crew had siphoned off fuel from their own ship and sold it on the black market. More often, though, the shipowners said they could not pay because, quite simply, they didn’t have the money.

In the rare instance that such cases get covered in the press, they are dismissed by industry spokespeople as aberrations, or they get watered down by discussions of the inevitable bureaucratic challenges that are distinct to transnational and offshore commerce. Those workers are independent contractors and not our responsibility. Those ships are flagged to another country. A manning agency should be handling their repatriation and pay. The shipowner, not the industry, should be held accountable. And so on.

What was striking to me, however, was that when it came to issues like countering Somali piracy, resisting unions, standardizing port protocol, countering terrorism threats, or resisting measures that might put large fisheries off-limits or impose stricter pollution or wage rules, these industries were surprisingly efficient and united.

The unfortunate truth was that in much of the maritime world the law protects a ship’s cargo better than its crew. In 2017, partly motivated by bad press and union pressure, the shipping industry came together in an unprecedented fashion and tried to confront their tendency to abandon seafarers. The industry imposed a new rule requiring shipowners to carry insurance to cover the costs of sailors marooned in port.

I had seen this problem often in the maritime world. What few worker protections existed at sea usually applied to the ships that needed them least.

In fact, this tendency toward solutions that just ever so barely missed their target was so common that it became tough not to wonder whether it was intentional. While some people might dismiss this speculation as conspiracy theory, I see it more as pattern recognition. I also wondered whether this slick practice was just the sort of sleight of hand that industries pay high-priced consultants to provide.

In 1898, the wooden, 118-foot ship became stuck in a pack of Antarctic ice in the Bellingshausen Sea. On board were nineteen men: nine sailors, two engineers, and an international team of eight officers and scientists, including a geologist, meteorologist, and anthropologist. As the sun disappeared for two months, the group hunkered down for a brutal winter. With no hope of being rescued, their true enemy was not the cold but madness. Within weeks, a crewman became paranoid and hid at night. Another announced plans to walk home to Belgium.

The remaining crew members were haggard and thin, but their faculties were largely intact because the captain had imposed a rigorous regimen meant to maintain their mental health. This regimen included a “baking treatment” in which the men were required to sit in front of a warming stove for half an hour and eat a diet of foul-tasting but vitamin-rich penguin meat. There was also mandatory participation in routine exercise outside on the ice and in social gatherings, including a beauty contest between images of women torn from the ship’s magazines.

One study by the ITF found that over half of the six hundred mariners interviewed reported feeling depressed during their time at sea. Another study published in the journal International Maritime Health found the global percentage of suicides among seafarers while at sea was more than three times higher than that of land-based suicides in the U.K. or Australia.

On board, a crewman can sit, sometimes for months, within sight but out of reach of sending his wife an email, eating a decent meal, having a doctor check the toothache that keeps him up at night, or hearing his daughter’s voice on her birthday.

Obviously, necessity was driving them: it’s a decent-paying job where options are few. But there is also a pull to life offshore. For all the suffering I heard about from these men, this pull seemed closer to resignation than enchantment, though powerful nonetheless.

During several years of reporting at sea, I grappled with a worsening case of what some mariners called sway. Others referred to it as dock rock, land sickness, reverse seasickness, or mal de débarquement (French for “disembarkation sickness”). As important as it was to get your sea legs when adjusting to life on a ship, it was equally essential to restore your land legs when you returned to shore.

Larceny has been a part of maritime life since humans first took to the seas, and though snatching a ship the size of a skyscraper has a ring of absurdity, it happens with surprising frequency.

My introduction to this topic came months earlier in a nine-by-twelve-inch manila envelope that had been mailed to my home. It arrived at my house with no indication of who sent it. Inside was a tattered, ten-page document titled “Port Scams” that consisted of a glossary of terms describing how to steal a ship, change its identity, surreptitiously siphon fuel, or pilfer cargo.

To sever ties between a ship and its past, the document suggested removing all tracking devices that might be built into the ship’s console or hull. Get rid of anything on the vessel with its name written on it, including life jackets, bridge paperwork, buoys, stationery, and lifeboats, the glossary advised. “Replace the ship’s first or build name,” it said, which is usually welded onto both sides of the bow and on the stern in foot-high, raised steel letters. “Don’t forget the serial plate on the ship’s main engine,” the document added, because it’s a favorite way for investigators to trace a stolen ship’s original identity.

On one side was a management company named NewLead, which ran the ship’s day-to-day operations, including looking after the crew, who were owed tens of thousands of dollars in back wages. These were the operators. On the other side was the ship’s mortgage lender, a New York venture capital firm called TCA Fund Management Group, which was owed $4.2 million by the shipowner. These were the bankers.

Over a plate of jumbo shrimp, Hardberger explained that a quirk in maritime law dictated that once a ship is sold, prior debt and arrests are cleared. If he could get the Sofia to one of these two countries, he could “scrub her bottom,” maritime jargon for cleaning it of prior liens and arrests.

Hardberger was a person whom nobody liked to call. The most seasoned maritime repo man in the business, he took only the toughest jobs. His company was called Vessel Extractions, and its specialty was sneaking—some might call it stealing—ships out of foreign harbors, usually under the cover of night, and moving them to jurisdictions where his clients might have a fighting chance of taking legal ownership of them. Ships like the Sofia.

The net around Zolotas’s properties was tightening fast, and if the Sofia was arrested in Greek waters, neither the bankers nor the unpaid Filipino crew on the ship could expect to see their money anytime soon. The Greek legal system was not known for its efficiency or for being sympathetic to foreign lenders or crews.

I learned that over the prior two decades Hardberger had seized more than two dozen ships and he had a reputation for taking on the toughest of grab-and-dash jobs, usually on behalf of banks, insurers, or shipowners. So, I tracked Hardberger down and sent him an email. I told him that I wanted to understand his techniques and outlook, and he agreed to let me write about his work.

A walking encyclopedia of underworld activity, Hardberger was able to recite, country by country, the ports that had yet to go digital. Useful information, he explained, because the ports still relying on paper records are far less likely to flag your name or passport number. I asked him to describe the ruses he had used over the years for boarding ships. “Let’s see here,” he responded, his face lighting up as if I’d asked a grandfather to show me photographs of his grandchildren. Most often, he explained, he posed as an interested buyer, a port official, or a charterer. He plied guards with booze and distracted them with prostitutes; spooked port police with witch doctors; and duped night watchmen into leaving their posts by lying to them about a relative being hospitalized.

Upping his twang at will, he could play the naïve provincial for effect despite usually being the best traveled person in the room. His bookish air contrasted sharply with his decades-old blue jeans. At one point, he recited lines from The Rubáiyát, an eleventh-century Persian poem written by a scholar named Omar Khayyám.

“Just seemed like an unfair fight,” Hardberger said about hunting animals.

During his college summers, Hardberger worked as a deckhand on a boat that delivered drilling fluid to offshore oil rigs and worked his way up to eventually earn his captain’s license, which allowed him to skipper his own cargo ship in the Caribbean before the age of twenty-eight. He also earned his airplane pilot’s license and supplemented his income flying crop duster planes and airlifting corpses to mortuaries that were too far away to transport the bodies by road. A true polymath, he also taught English and history at a high school in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and later at a parochial school in Slidell, Louisiana, before enrolling in a master’s degree program at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he focused on fiction and poetry.

Hardberger said he liked the work and that by 1998, after a four-year correspondence course through Northwestern California University, he passed the California bar exam on his first try, without sitting a single day in law school.

It was 2004. Haiti had erupted in an armed rebellion. The ship, Hardberger’s target, was the ten-thousand-ton, ten-story-tall Maya Express. After hiring the vessel to haul 235 used cars from the northeastern United States to Haiti, an American businessman refused to pay for the trip. This caused the owner of the ship to default on his mortgage, leading Haitian authorities to detain the ship in port. In league with corrupt local officials, the American businessman set up a rigged auction in which he planned to buy the ship.

The shipowner hired Hardberger and sent him to Miragoane to steal the ship from port before his adversaries stole it at auction. Shortly after arriving, Hardberger discovered that watchmen stationed on the Maya Express were selling fuel from the vessel on the black market. He also discovered a small but important fact: port authorities could only use their cell phone at the harbor’s soccer field—the lone spot in the area with reliable service.

The next day, I made some due-diligence calls to the U.S. Coast Guard Office of Investigations, Interpol, and the bar association in California, where Hardberger was licensed as a lawyer. I wanted to check for records of complaints, disciplinary actions, or arrest warrants for him. There were none.

People often took ships to Miragoane to give them new identities. The port was remote and relatively unpatrolled, its waters deep and ideal for bigger vessels. Someone who wanted a fast makeover and new paperwork for a stolen boat could have it done in under two days—removing all names, prying loose the serial plate from the engine, and welding off the original metal name.

Hardberger explained the simple math of giving a ship a new identity. “All you need is about $300, four welders, and a fax machine,” he said. “But especially the $300.”

Harbormasters wield unusual power. Inspectors can detain a ship for any number of reasons, including the condition of the hull, the size of the sleeping quarters, and the legibility of the logbooks. In poorer countries, keeping a ship in port as long as possible is an easy way to boost the local economy.

The Panama Canal is often called the Marlboro Canal because of its preferred black-market boodle.

Everyone in commercial shipping suffers from bribes, but no one wants to fight the problem publicly because virtually all of them are complicit to some degree in the illegal behavior.

From the rowboat, they pretended to be potential ship buyers and shouted up questions to the crews. On two of the ships, the crews yelled down that they had been detained by local officials. One ship was being repaired after a suspicious fire. The crew said openly that they believed the fire to have been set intentionally for the sake of insurance fraud.

Pausing over one of the wrecks, I joked that it represented a lost opportunity for the ship-breaking business. “No one will be chopping it up any time soon,” I observed. The boat driver reminded me that just because it was sunk didn’t mean someone couldn’t still steal it. After all, this is why there are “sea scrappers,” he said.

In that country, sea scrappers came mostly from the Madurese ethnic group and were renowned for their efficiency in stripping sunken ships of their valuable metals. They paddled their wooden boats out a couple miles from shore, equipped with crowbars, hammers, hatchets, and a diesel-powered air compressor tethered to what looked like a garden hose for breathing.

To learn a few more tricks of the trade, I called Douglas Lindsay, another maritime repo man and the lead partner with a recovery firm based in England called Maritime Resolve. He explained that although stealing a ship is sometimes the goal of maritime scams, most port corruption consists of “squeeze and release” bilking schemes.

Shipping businesses go bankrupt as waiting cargo spoils, delivery deadlines pass, and owed wages accumulate. Sometimes these detentions are part of a broader plot to take ownership of the vessel through a hastily convened public auction or judicial sale.

An insurer hired him to win the release of a Greek-operated cargo ship carrying sugar from Brazil, which, upon arriving in the West African country of Guinea, accidentally damaged a pier. The captain was arrested, as was his ship. He was detained pending a $50 million fine based on what the insurer estimated was less than $10,000 worth of damages. “They fly you in; you find the right official and negotiate him back to planet Earth,” Lindsay said, adding that the ship and its captain were ultimately released for under $200,000.

For all the expense imposed by this sort of port corruption, shipping is still highly lucrative because most seasoned operators know whom to pay off and how to pass to consumers these hidden and inevitable costs of doing business. More than 90 percent of the world’s goods, from fuel to food to merchandise, is carried to market by sea, and bribery in ports adds hundreds of millions of dollars each year in unofficial import taxes and added costs of cargo and ship fuel, which in turn raise transport costs, insurance rates, and sticker prices by more than 10 percent.

In Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan, for example, phantom vessels are used to transport fighters tied to Islamic militant groups, and they were used in 2012 by the terrorists who attacked Mumbai.

Maritime scams (or for that matter, shipping generally) typically involve four main actors: the charterer, the shipper, the receiver, and the ship’s owner.

Some peculiarities of maritime law play into crooks’ hands. A captain’s logbook carries unusual legal weight in a courtroom, for example. If a corrupt charterer pays a captain to write that the cargo was damaged during the trip, that ship is probably not leaving port until someone pays up.

The anonymity of ship trading also makes stealing easier. If the rightful owner can catch up with a stolen painting, car, or artifact at an auction, he can make a claim and, in many cases, repossess his property. Such redress is far more difficult under international maritime law.

Except under special circumstances, a ship may only be stopped in international waters by a warship of its own flag or with permission granted from the fleeing ship’s flag state.

Therein lies the beauty of international ship thievery: crooks only have to run if someone’s chasing them, and that’s rarely the case.