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

by Matthew Campbell

That one transmission encapsulated a set of challenges typical of the fragmented nature of modern shipping. The tanker was owned by a corporate entity in a Pacific tax haven—the Marshall Islands—which was in turn owned by a Greek family based in Piraeus, just outside Athens. It sailed under the

flag of tiny Liberia, which augments its finances by selling cheap, hassle-free registrations to about one in ten of the world’s commercial vessels. Not that its regulators actually resided in that impoverished West African nation; by historical quirk, the Liberian registry was run by Israeli-American entrepreneurs operating out of a headquarters in Dulles, Virginia. Meanwhile, the oil the tanker was carrying was owned by a trading firm based in Switzerland and Monaco.

The Brillante’s patchwork of relationships wasn’t unusually complicated by industry standards. It was the by-product of a system that had evolved over the previous six decades to eliminate financial and regulatory friction at every opportunity, driving the price of transporting goods as low as possible. ...

It’s standard practice for vessels to be legally owned by brass-plate companies set up in far-flung tax shelters, of which the Marshall Islands is one of many.

But eventually, entrepreneurial officials in countries like Panama realized they could raise revenue by offering what’s now called a flag of convenience. By registering their vessels in these places, owners could avoid developed-world rules on wages, working hours, and union membership, while also being subject to fewer inspections and a more relaxed attitude to regulation.

Today, Panama, the Marshall Islands, and Liberia serve as the ostensible homes of more than a third of the global merchant fleet, and there are even flags of convenience available from places like Mongolia and Bolivia, landlocked countries with no actual maritime industries to speak of.

was also communicating with a Greek firm called Central Mare, which the Brillante’s owners had hired to operate the tanker day-to-day, making sure it was fully crewed, supplied, and documented.

In every major port and waterway, there are salvage companies waiting to respond to distress calls, serving as something like a private emergency service for the open ocean. In return for the difficult and dangerous work of putting out a fire, plugging a leak, or towing an immobilized ship to safety, salvors have the right to claim a portion of the value of what they save—often around 10 percent, though the most challenging jobs can earn them far more. With so much oil on board, the Brillante would be a major prize for this team, who’d come with impressive speed from nearby Aden.

Solal Shipping, whose business was to find seaborne transport and manage logistics for clients looking to move their goods from shore to shore. In this case, the client was Holt Global, an international oil trading firm, which had engaged Solal to arrange the shipment of a cargo from Ukraine to eastern China.

In maritime trade, events can quickly spiral from unfortunate, to dire, to worse.

The first thing to know about Lloyd’s is that it doesn’t, in fact, sell insurance, and it never has. The name instead refers to an umbrella organization for hundreds of “members”—a mix of corporations and wealthy individuals—who actually provide policies, which are then said to have been sold at Lloyd’s. The next thing to know about Lloyd’s is that it is everywhere.

That’s where Lloyd’s comes in. There, a broker is appointed for the project, and then shops it around to Lloyd’s members, who come together in one or more “syndicates” to insure it. Each member of a syndicate takes on a piece of the liability, as much as the individual insurer can afford to lose.

Lloyd’s is the place where “storms and fires and floods and earthquakes, and every possible man-made calamity are systematically reduced to manageable routine,”

“These perils are chopped up and spread around and shared out so that instead of being an unbearable risk for a few, they are a small risk for many, and thus

lose their t...

Letters of marte (or marque)—official documents authorizing attacks on merchants, given to state-sanctioned pirates, or “privateers,” like Sir Francis Drake—have ceased to be much of a problem. But the sea remains as dangerous as ever.

Talbot Underwriting was part of a syndicate of “hull” insurers—Lloyd’s members who were covering the ship itself, separately from the oil on board. Cargo ships often require several types of insurance at once, to protect against any foreseeable problem. Syndicate 1183, the typically cheerless name given to Talbot’s group, were the “war risks insurers,” meaning they were responsible for compensating the shipowner in the event of a mishap of the man-made variety. War risks policies pay out more often than the name might suggest.

Long after the rest of London’s financial industry had converged toward international standards of workplace conduct, the market remained a deeply retrograde environment for women.

The broker would have continued in this manner until he’d filled the slip with “underwriters,” so called because they write their names one under the other.

In 1799 the HMS Lutine, a thirty-two-gun Royal Navy frigate, sank off the coast of the Netherlands while carrying a million pounds’ worth of silver and gold. The treasure was never found. But almost sixty years later, the ship’s bell was

salvaged from the ocean floor and put on display in the Lloyd’s Underwriting Room, where for the next century it was rung to announce the fate of overdue vessels: once for a loss, twice for safe.

Yemenis had settled into their afternoon ritual of chewing qat, the mildly narcotic leaf most local men consumed daily.

The sea lanes off the Yemeni coast are some of the most important in the world, and its harbors remained busy despite deepening political turmoil. An

Even the most basic facts of the Brillante’s voyage seemed odd. Every commercial captain knew that the best defense against pirates was speed; a ship moving slowly, or worse, not moving at all, presented much too easy a target. But Gonzaga, the Brillante’s master, had left the vessel to drift in a dangerous area, with no ability to quickly flee if a threat appeared. Similarly, elementary antipiracy procedures—protocols with which a mariner of Gonzaga’s experience would be intimately familiar—called for taking every precaution before letting unfamiliar visitors onto a vessel. Yet the pirates who attacked the Brillante had apparently been able to deceive the crew into letting them on board without firing a shot.

while the insurers were able to pass a large chunk of their losses to clients in the form of higher premiums, the attacks presented a more fundamental threat to the business models of everyone involved. The modern evolution of shipping had been, in large part, about predictability: ironing out the uncertainties of the sea in order to all but guarantee that products would arrive where and when they were supposed to, and for an affordable price. The Gulf of Aden was vital to many of those journeys, and pirates operating there had severely undermined the confidence that the industry depended upon.

“In all probability,” Veale said, “ransom payments are finding their way into financial systems outside Somalia.” Specifically, the money that insurers and shipowners paid, in cash, was being magicked into bank accounts in Dubai, moving from there into the global financial system and investments like real estate and restaurants, some of them a long way from the Horn of Africa. That flow of funds represented a vulnerability that Veale was proposing to exploit. “We’re not talking about trying to seize money from guys with guns,” he said. “We’re talking about frustrating their financial ambitions.” There was an obvious place to start.

After a couple of years, he shifted to doing it full-time. He proved to be an able detective. Veale and his team worked to bust up a major car-theft ring, eventually tracing the vehicles to the docks in Bristol, where they were sealed in crates awaiting export.

The city—and, more specifically, the City—had become an essential nexus, connecting Western institutions to the fortunes being made in what the bankers had started to call emerging markets. Soon, ex-Soviet oligarchs would be suing each other over soured mergers in the English courts, while Central Asian mining companies tried to raise money on London’s capital markets and African politicians shifted their assets into British-domiciled banks.

He consulted Jane’s, the private-sector database for aerospace information, and identified a twin-engine turboprop that he thought was likeliest to be the one employed by the police. Then he pulled up the UK’s civil-aviation registry, which had a list of all aircraft of that type operating in the country. The records indicated that most belonged to conventional government agencies. But a small number of the planes, Veale told the detectives, “stood out like bulldogs’ bollocks.” Their ostensibly private owner was a partnership, rather than a limited company, which could leave the people behind it personally liable in the event of an accident. “No businessman in their right mind would own an aircraft in a nonlimited structure,” Veale said. “They are your aircraft.” The cops bought him a drink—and then asked what else he could do.

“Yemen is a world of relationships, not institutions,”

the Brillante was “not the first ship that’s gone down like this.” Cynthia stared back at him. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Same place, same owner, and same salvage crew,” the Lloyd’s man replied. “This has happened before.”

Sloane found everything about the job intoxicating: the urgency, the stakes, the intellectual challenge of finding a new solution for each vessel that needed rescue. On any given day, a salvor might be eating breakfast, or playing with his kids, or in the middle of a night’s sleep when his phone rang, sending him sprinting out the door with a bag of clothes and equipment that he kept packed at all times. Within hours he could be leaping from a helicopter onto a foundering freighter, mustering every ounce of seamanship he possessed to save the vessel and its cargo. There was no rush like it.

it’s an open secret that some salvors, in exchange

for receiving a contract or being tipped off about an accident before competitors hear of it, kick back part of their compensation to shipowners.

(More recent changes provide for payment for preventing environmental consequences in some cases, even if a salvage fails in other respects.)

The result was that any oil company with a public profile typically wouldn’t hire a tanker unless it could be assured the vessel was well maintained.

Pirates, after all, didn’t typically destroy the vessels they hijacked.

What they’d found in the bowels of the ship confirmed what David Mockett had only suspected: the early accounts of how the Brillante had come to be in its present condition were wrong. The fire hadn’t been started by an errant grenade, or gunfire igniting a fuel tank. Instead, someone had made their way deep

below deck, to perhaps the best place on the whole vessel to start a devastating blaze, and planted a bomb.

Not far from Karachi, on Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast, is a place where ships go to die. The Gadani breaking yard occupies some six miles of beach, segmented into plots by small recycling outfits that are servants to capitalism in its

most elemental form.

The Gadani yard is one of the most dangerous workplaces in the world. Despite efforts by activists to impose meaningful safety standards, fatal accidents are common, as is contamination by the many toxic chemicals that can be found in aging vessels.

On average, roughly half a million British citizens die each year. Of those fatalities, only a tiny fraction, around thirty thousand, are referred to a coroner for an inquest into the cause of death. The proceedings are reserved for sudden or “unnatural” ends, or for when a person dies in the custody of the state—in a prison cell, for example. Since the 1980s, they have also been legally required for all violent deaths abroad, after a campaign inspired by the fate of Helen Smith, a British nurse who fell from a balcony in mysterious circumstances in Saudi Arabia.

There are many ways to sink a ship. The mightiest naval destroyer can be laid low by a single rogue wave. In a storm, if the swell is taller than a boat is long, it can

flip a vessel like a tossed coin, tumbling it end over end into a vertical dive. Sailors call this pitch-poling. The long steel hull of a tanker might twist and flex as mountains of water pass underneath, causing enough stress to break it in two. A heavy cargo, such as coal, can sink a vessel and its crew simply by shifting position, unbalancing the precise naval engineering that keeps them afloat.

But the simplest way to send a ship to the depths is to open the side hatches, or “scuttles,” and wait for it to fill with water. Consequently, deliberately sinking a ship has become known as “scuttling.”

Readers of military history may be familiar with a common use of scuttling: to stop valuable assets from falling into enemy hands.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that some Greek entrepreneurs were among the first to realize that ships can be worth more below the surface of the water than above it.

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.

Plimsoll was forced to apologize for his comments, but his campaign led to the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876, which required every vessel to have a mark showing its maximum level of submergence to prevent overloading: the Plimsoll Line. (The term also gave rise to a popular style of rubber-lined gym shoe.) The legislation helped, as far as it went, although it didn’t take away the financial incentive for scuttling. And the Lloyd’s insurers whose cash kept the shipwreckers in business escaped Plimsoll’s ire—and any public reckoning.