Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World's Most Secretive Industry

by Matthew Campbell

India and Indonesia and, especially, the Philippines. Filipinos tend to be favored above all others by shipowners because of their good English, as well as their willingness to work long hours, ask few impertinent questions, and accept low wages.

More than 11,000 oil tankers ply the sea-lanes, ranging from modest barges to so-called VLCCs, or very large crude carriers, as long as the Chrysler Building is tall.

The tankers share the ocean with another 5,300 container ships, the greatest of which are even larger than the biggest tankers, with capacity for tens of thousands of standardized steel boxes.

in 2019, the total volume of goods loaded onto ships worldwide, oil included, exceeded 11 billion metric tons, more than four times the figure in 1970.

the entire modern shipping industry had been structured to interpose layer upon corporate layer between the men who profited from owning ships and those who labored on them.

virtually no vessels carrying armed guards had been successfully captured.

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.

with the precise cadence of a man ever attentive to how his words might be interpreted,

“Do you actually know what that means?” “That there’s no smoking gun,” the man replied. “A smoking gun is the best example of circumstantial evidence,”

Lloyd’s didn’t appear to have a central database of its customers, let alone reliable information about who stood behind the shell companies that typically owned ships. “You need to do more,” one of them urged.

if the quantum of the claim was such that ‘the game was not worth the candle’”—an obscure expression, coined before the advent of electricity, about avoiding card games with stakes lower than the expense of illuminating them.

The marine assets controlled from Piraeus dwarf those held by Japan, with 11 percent of the total, and the US, with just 3 percent.

Veale and Conner had been in the investigative game long enough to know that it was critical to keep a poker face when interviewing an informant. Showing obvious surprise or enthusiasm could influence what a source said next, or give him unhelpful ideas about the value of his information.

For a man who’d needed a court order to testify, he had a remarkable amount to say, and a detailed rebuttal to every attempt to cast doubt on his story.

“Don’t ask me questions why I didn’t do what I didn’t do . . . whatever I did was correct because I’m still alive today. That’s all I know.”

But five years later, in 2019, the US Treasury Department announced sanctions against the Despina Andrianna and associated companies, alleging that they had been running embargoed Venezuelan oil to Cuba, to the benefit of President Nicolás Maduro’s brutal regime.

American law firm asserted that since the virus was microscopic and could only survive temporarily outside the human body, the damage it caused wasn’t physically quantifiable. Insurers seized on the defense enthusiastically.

The market kept on going, even as the Lloyd’s corporation, which operates it, swung from a 2.5 billion pound pretax profit in 2019 to a 900 million pound loss in 2020.