Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy

by Matthew Campbell

Cuthbert Heath, told agents to “pay all of our policyholders in full, irrespective of the terms of their policies,” an injunction that became something of a guiding principle.

Why does this work?

Posgate hiked his prices and signed his name next to any slip put in front of him.

Little risk selection

Nor, if they were so inclined, could the insurers deny the claim without solid evidence of what had happened.

Claim denial

“Yemen is a world of relationships, not institutions,” wrote Ginny Hill, an analyst and journalist who covered the country for more than a decade. Partly for reasons of self-preservation, “each version of events that is revealed to you depends on the speaker’s assessment of your connections and suspected affiliations.”

Wow great description of communication

Mockett, he said shortly after being sworn in, was a “hot frog,” a term used by government personnel to describe expatriates who stick to their routines despite rising danger. “There are those frogs who sit in warm water as it simmers, then boils, and stay there,” Tottman explained. “It’s a term of endearment.”

Hot frog

Sinking a ship to claim the insurance money isn’t so different from a debt-ridden bar owner lighting a match to escape his failing business, or a driver engineering a fender bender to claim whiplash and collect a payout. The trick is to make it look like an accident. Maritime

True. claim injury

Scandals were bad for business.

Why? maybe "names" were less willing to participate if they knew fraud was an issue

And the Lloyd’s insurers whose cash kept the shipwreckers in business escaped Plimsoll’s ire—and any public reckoning.

Indeed. insurers were morally corrupt.

By establishing a high legal bar for rejecting claims, the ruling made it even harder for the London market to fight suspected fraud.

Legal challenges to pursuing fraud

FERIT’s most significant finding was that the scuttling craze was linked to organized crime groups operating out of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. They seemed to have access to shipwrecking specialists. A welding contractor, for example, was hired to cut four half-meter holes in a vessel’s hull and then seal them with metal panels that could be removed when the time came. A few of the culprits were jailed, but most disappeared before they could be captured. The

Organized crime

As Veale saw it, the problem was that the different components of the Lloyd’s market were terrified of opening themselves to accusations that they were colluding against customers, which might lead to an antitrust complaint.

Antitrust

was interpreted at Lloyd’s as a warning about the risks of taking on a well-connected shipowner.

Counter pressure

he’d observed that they were “willing to wound, yet afraid to strike.”

Good insight

Fairly or not, he saw a set of traits in Zavos that he’d encountered again and again in his dealings with corporate lawyers: absolute certainty, imperviousness to criticism, and a deep aversion to unpleasant conversations.

Description of corporate claims attorneys

‘the game was not worth the candle’

“Motivation: revenge and money,”

Notable

feeling more powerful than his fear.

Wow

“im afraid to God,” he wrote. “how long i can hide the truth in my conscience.”

Ah. Truth has a force. satyagraha is Gandhi’s phrase