The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina

Once it’s on the move, a stolen ship can travel thousands of miles in under a week. Investigators post reward notices, comb sale listings, and contact port officials. Seeking clues, they publish fake job advertisements and call on the relatives, ex-wives, or jilted girlfriends of the ship’s former crew.

Even domestic recoveries of boats in the United States are difficult because the relevant databases are not well connected across states and they have less information than the ones dedicated to automobiles.

After a case of Jack Daniel’s was delivered to the port master’s office and $55,000 was discreetly wired to his bank account, the men and ship were quietly set free. “Bribing is illegal,” Meacham emphasized to me. “Negotiating a fine is not.”

Devising a plan for sneaking a ship out of port typically starts with surveillance, several repo men told me. Watch long enough and there is almost always a thirty-minute block each day, typically during the guards’ shift change, when the vessel is unmanned.

To verify the identity of the ship, he checks the engine serial number, which thieves often forget to remove. If he can get private access to the engine room, Hardberger carries a glass vial of magnetic powder to sprinkle on the hull where the ship’s original or “build” name has often been pried off. The shadow of the name still shows up because welding it off changes the metal’s valence, which makes the magnetic powder adhere differently.

Repo men hire local politicians to close nearby roads, street youth to set alley fires, or bar owners to host grand parties on the opposite side of town. Hardberger said the worst thing he had ever done to get a guard off a ship was to pay someone to lie to him, saying the guard’s mother had just been hospitalized.

“I hired you for a piracy action,” Bono recounted a lawyer in New York working for the bankers yelling at him during one call. “And you keep telling me about clearance orders?” Bono replied that this was Greece, not Haiti. Absconding with a ship was a tougher proposition in this part of the world.

The crewmen had gone unpaid by the owner for the past several months. In a rare move for this industry, the agency was now stepping in to avert a crisis, sending money back to the Philippines to the crew’s families. The agency’s owner took pity but also had a reputation to uphold among Philippine seafarers because he would likely want to recruit more of them in the future.

Finally, the next day, the two sides reached a deal. The operators agreed to allow the Sofia to sail to Malta if the bankers paid $50,000. The bankers and Bono described the money as “extortion, pure and simple.” The operators, on the other hand, had their own description of the proposed sum: “an act of generosity” on their part. They argued that in light of the expensive delays they had endured due to the bankers’ “attempted piracy,” this money was a pittance of what they were truly owed.

Though federal prosecutors in the Philippines had tried to figure out how Andrade died, they had failed to get to the ship operator. In fact, they failed even to get at the owners of the manning agency. I wanted to know why.

Andrade’s family told me that in the summer of 2010, Andrade was growing restless. He had studied criminology in college in hopes of becoming a police officer, not realizing that he was two inches shy of the five-foot-three minimum height requirement. He took a night watchman job at the local hospital instead, earning less than fifty cents an hour.

Over 56 million people globally work at sea on fishing boats. Another 1.6 million people work in shipping on freighters, tankers, container ships, and other types of merchant vessels. For the most part, both kinds of workers get their jobs through employment firms called manning agencies.

Manning agencies like Step Up Marine handle everything from paychecks and plane tickets to port fees and passports. These agencies are also poorly regulated and frequently abusive.

Most men I spoke to there said that before they were recruited onto fishing boats, they had never before traveled abroad, worked on the high seas, heard of the term “trafficking,” or dealt with a manning agency.

The document noted that to collect their wages, crew members had to fly back to Singapore at their own expense.

Even though Andrade and the other Filipino men traveled to Singapore at different times over a several-year period, virtually all of them described in nearly identical terms the apartment above Step Up Marine’s office. Jolovan Wham, executive director of the Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics, an advocacy group in Singapore, visited this apartment in 2014 while trying to help a seafarer trapped there. He told me the men in the apartment were “packed like sardines.”

Over the past decade, no country has exported more seafarers annually than the Philippines, which provided roughly a quarter of the crews on merchant ships globally, despite comprising less than 2 percent of the world’s population.

They said the government drove the export of workers, which was turning the Philippines into a “nation of gypsies.” These critics also faulted the government for failing to create enough domestic jobs to keep its citizens from leaving home and then failing to protect them once they were abroad.

In floor after floor of cavernous rooms, clerks sit in rows behind big wooden desks, pressing their ballpoint pens hard on triplicate forms, surrounded by stacks of manila folders to be filed in tall metal cabinets with squeaky, uncooperative drawers.

For example, one filing cabinet held a 2012 study showing that the Philippine embassy in Singapore had received more requests for assistance (about sixty-three between January 2010 and April 2011) related to trafficking from Filipino men coming off fishing vessels than from Filipina women involved in the sex and nightlife entertainment industry (work that is widely considered far more prone to trafficking abuses).

He explained that if a Filipino housekeeper in Kuwait was raped by her employer, she could go to the Philippine embassy for help. “At sea, on the other hand,” he said, “there are no embassies.”

Immigration authorities at the Manila airport stopped Filipino men bound for abroad who fit a certain profile. In this effort, the government focused on men between the ages of twenty and forty who gave off signals that they might be from rural areas: darker skin, cheaper clothes, less savvy about traveling. The strategy had minimal effect, Hernandez said, because the manning agencies simply began instructing the men on how to answer questions that would otherwise get them flagged.

For several weeks, I contacted seafarer advocacy and human rights groups around the world and asked them to check their files for any mention of this company and to share with me whatever documents they could. It was quickly apparent that Step Up Marine was notorious for misconduct.

All these firms shared a playbook. They used debt, trickery, fear, violence, shame, and family ties to recruit, entrap, and leave men at sea, sometimes for years, under harsh conditions. These firms also showed that trafficking of mariners was more routine than rogue and usually orchestrated not by shady underworld crime bosses but by incorporated businesses allowed to operate with impunity by government agencies willing to look the other way.

But I was also coming to understand that there was a larger role that manning agencies play in the global fishing industry. These firms were not just there to provide a buffer of responsibility and culpability between the crew and their employers. Their purpose was also to help bolster a certain illusion about globalization. The manning agencies—especially the shady ones prone to undercutting wages and tricking workers—provide the efficiencies that fishing companies need to hold up a fantasy that consumers around the world desperately want to believe.

This fantasy is that it is possible to fish sustainably, legally, and using workers with contracts, making a livable wage, and still deliver a five-ounce can of skipjack tuna for $2.50 that ends up on the grocery shelf only days after the fish was pulled from the water thousands of miles away.

Fishing companies would most likely struggle to stay financially afloat if they had to recruit and handle the logistics for the men who work such dangerous jobs at impossibly low wages.

Such is the inconvenient truth of globalization: it is based more on market sleight of hand than on Adam Smith’s invisible hand. By outsourcing this task to manning agencies, the people who work in the corporate responsibility and human resources offices of the grocery store chains and fish wholesalers further down the supply chain need not try to understand or explain how it is possible that the captains on these boats found workers willing to work for so little.

In Singapore, I hired a local reporter to discreetly visit the Step Up Marine’s main office. He took pictures on his cell phone and emailed them to me. Located in a second-floor shopping mall, across from a sex-toy shop and a massage parlor, the office was small and cramped.

There were illustrative parallels between the way the Lims distanced themselves from their recruited workers and the way the Philippine government did the same with their exported workers. Neither would take responsibility for placing workers in dangerous and abusive settings because that would mean they were accountable for fixing the problem.

Unfortunately, this court decision was also a turning point. It was roughly when Victor Lim and Step Up Marine shifted away from using registered manning agencies in the Philippines and instead started relying, illegally, on Filipino domestic workers in Singapore to recruit their relatives from small villages.

After Andrade died, officials from Step Up Marine and the owner of the Taiwanese fishing ship where Andrade worked offered to pay his family about $5,000, according to a 2012 letter from the Philippine embassy in Singapore. It was a woeful offer considering that a seafarer’s death benefit provided by a legal manning agency in the Philippines is typically at least $50,000.

In Singapore, labor department officials struggled to explain to me why they had not prosecuted the firm for trafficking and other violations. They said they had investigated and concluded that Step Up Marine’s role was purely administrative. It was a mere middleman, the bureaucrats contended, providing introductions between fishing companies and workers and offering logistical support to facilitate their deployment onto vessels by helping with accommodations, airfare, and maritime paperwork.

I spent nearly a week trying to get in touch with the two pathologists—emailing government officials and former employers and getting help looking for phone numbers from Times reporters based with the foreign desk. I got nowhere. The only utility in reaching this dead end was that it made an important point: If a full-time investigative reporter, with all the resources of The New York Times behind him, couldn’t even find these pathologists, how did Andrade’s family expect to ever get answers?

Urinating on these sorts of fishing boats tends to be relatively easy. Defecating, on the other hand, takes a gymnast’s balance.

The failure to prosecute anyone other than Robelo was a powerful reminder of the so-called tragedy of the commons, the idea that we neglect what we don’t own individually. Because the high seas belong to everyone and no one, governments fail to cooperate in protecting marine workers or investigating abuses.

The one man I got to open up I met on a muddy back road next to a lonely fruit cart. The man said he knew of the case and would likely have fallen into the same trap himself had the job been offered. I asked why. He said nothing in response, but he simply gestured toward his meager selection of half-rotting mangoes, santols, and bananas.

I quietly suspected the oil companies would win. They usually did in such fights, and not just because of their much deeper pockets. The rules, after all, were written in their favor.

Arguably the least policed realm on the planet, the sea bottom is also a world over which scientists, conservationists, industry, and governments routinely tussle for access and control. And yet we have mapped more of the night sky than we have charted the ocean’s depths.

Marine authorities later told me that the U.S. government had never done a comprehensive study nor even fully mapped the vast ecosystems in the 4.5 million square miles of ocean that fall under its jurisdiction.

Most people tend to think of countries’ territory ending at their shorelines. But under international law, a nation’s jurisdiction usually stretches two hundred miles from its coasts (although various parts of its sovereignty peter out along the way, which is why Gomperts and her ships had to sail only twelve miles off the coast of Mexico, and Sealand had to be only three miles from Britain’s shores). As a result, the area under U.S. control is actually more sea (roughly 4.5 million square miles) than land (about 3.5 million square miles).

Altering this reality posed a threat to the drilling and fishing industries, which lobbied aggressively against the federal efforts to exert more control over this region, as they had in the past. These industries viewed mapping the oceans as a precursor to zoning them, which would likely lead to greater limits on the industries’ reach. In April 2017, President Trump revoked Obama’s executive order.

Forty-nine environmentalists were killed in Brazil in 2016, more than in any other country. By July 2017, another forty-five had been killed in Brazil. Rarely was anyone prosecuted for such crimes, which were often brutal and brazen. One environmentalist had his ears severed and sent to his family. A nun who had been protesting logging in the Amazon rain forest was shot in broad daylight. Over the past decade, roughly half the murders of environmentalists worldwide took place in Brazil.

After a day of sailing, though, the captain of our ship received a blunt message from the Brazilian Navy: if we put the submarine in the water, we would be arrested, even though no permission was required. The navy’s intrusion into a perfectly legal scientific exploration demonstrated how, in the outlaw ocean, countries and virtually everyone else make up rules as often as they ignore them.

It is highly destructive in two ways. Though efficient, trawling is also undiscriminating. In minutes, the nets wipe out coral reefs that might have taken thousands of years to grow, leaving a flattened lifeless field in their wake. The indiscriminate carnage it causes is not unlike, as one writer put it, hunting for squirrels by stringing a net a mile wide between immense all-terrain vehicles and dragging it at speed across the plains of Africa. The main difference is that in the case of the African plains, the public would be outraged to learn that the vast majority of what gets caught is needlessly killed and tossed aside to rot.

In the fight for control over the ocean floor, however, Greenpeace’s biggest adversary has for many years been the oil and gas industry.

A team from Penn State University returned with shocking footage that showed the seafloor looking more like an asphalt parking lot than the colorful kaleidoscope it had been just months earlier. Rather than dissipating the oil, the dispersant had in fact been sinking it to the ocean’s bottom, coating virtually everything on its way down. I covered the BP spill for the Times, and I remember reading the internal documents and court records where BP scientists discussed this problem. The concerns about the dispersant seemed so academic and inconsequential until I watched the before-and-after footage that came from the affected seafloor.

Despite its reputation for having especially protective environmental policies, Norway depended on oil and gas production for roughly 40 percent of its export revenue, and it wasn’t about to give up a significant portion of that to placate some pesky environmental group.

To listen to Hocevar talk about corals and marine biology was to be reminded of the Mark Twain line about how the two most important days of your life are the day you’re born and the day you found out why.

Corals are expert builders, arguably the best on the planet, though they are slow. The result of 200 to 300 million years of evolution, they grow at a snail’s pace—most expanding less than an inch a year. For example, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, big and bright enough to be visible from space, had grown to 133,000 square miles, over double the size of Pennsylvania, and is still relatively young at about 600,000 years old.