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

by Matthew Campbell

Sailors in the Gulf of Aden knew that pirate attacks often ended with the ship and crew being taken to Somalia—about ten hours’ sailing from the Brillante’s position. In Somalia, captured crews waited, sometimes for a very long time, while a shipowner or, more likely, the owner’s insurance company, negotiated a ransom. One particularly unfortunate group of sailors was held for more than four years in a remote town, four hundred kilometers from Mogadishu, before a bounty was paid. Three of them died during the hijack or in captivity; the rest survived by eating rats.

The moment the Brillante’s Ship Security Reporting System (SSRS) was activated, it automatically generated messages that were delivered to various government and private-sector organizations. The alerts included the vessel’s name, position, speed, and status: “MV Brillante Virtuoso, IMO 9014822, Liberian flag at posn 1229N 04445E crse 140, 0.5 kts.” Within seconds, one such message arrived at the office of United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, or UKMTO, in Dubai. To this day, the UK retains an outsize role in marine affairs, a legacy of when the Royal Navy patrolled an empire on which the sun never set. Even as Britain’s influence waned after the Second World War, much of the legal and administrative machinery of modern shipping remained in British hands. In the 2000s, with piracy escalating into a severe problem, the UKMTO was made responsible for connecting military forces with the merchant ships they were supposed to protect, keeping everyone communicating during a crisis.

“TO ALL: BRILLIANTE VIRTUOSO, flag Liberian, owner Marshall Islands, crew 26 all Filipino,” he wrote in a Mercury message at 3:55 a.m. 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.

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. Operating with minimally paid crews and subject to almost no meaningful taxation, by the early years of the twenty-first century giant cargo ships had become so efficient that it cost only about $2,000 to get a container of gadgets from Shenzhen to one of the dozen or so major US ports. For better and worse, this remarkable fact had transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people—from European and American consumers, who gained access to unimagined bounties of cheap stuff, to workers in countries like China and Vietnam, given a ticket into the middle class by newly profitable export industries.

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. Even maritime insiders often find it difficult to determine who a ship actually belongs to, behind whatever entity, usually with a meaninglessly generic name, is listed on an official document. This lack of transparency allows for substantial cost cutting, for example by placing vessels’ earnings far beyond the reach of major tax authorities—as well as regulatory evasion.

In the early twentieth century, most shipowners paid to register under the jurisdiction of major marine powers like Britain and the United States, benefiting from their legal regimes and military protection. 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. The practice got a running start during Prohibition, when American cruise liners were able to serve booze to passengers by flagging themselves as Panamanian, and became increasingly common after the Second World War. 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.

Phil Norwood hadn’t been in the office long when an insurance broker strolled into his cubicle. “We’ve had a tanker attacked,” the man announced. Norwood sighed—another one—then grabbed a pen and scrawled out the vessel’s name on the front of an empty file: “Brillante Virtuoso.” Norwood was a tall Englishman with the ruffled demeanor of a not-so-serious schoolboy. He worked as a claims manager for the marine arm of Zurich Insurance Group, which was housed in a building with a gloomy, faux-gothic façade, one among several towers clustered around Lloyd’s of London, the world’s leading insurance market. Months earlier, another broker from the same firm as the one now standing beside Norwood’s desk had brought the Brillante business to Lloyd’s, where a group of insurers, including Zurich, had agreed to cover the $100 million of oil it would soon be carrying.

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. If you take a train to work, there is a good chance that train was insured at Lloyd’s. The Titanic was insured at Lloyd’s. When Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted segregated buses in the 1950s, Lloyd’s was the only place they could find to insure their substitute carpool system. After 9/11, Lloyd’s members paid out billions of dollars to airlines, businesses in crisis, and the relatives of those killed in the attacks. If you were to compile a list of the worst catastrophes of the last century, virtually all of them would, at some point, have ended up as claims at Lloyd’s, to be assessed and valued by Englishmen in bespoke suits who represent billions upon billions of dollars in capital. Lloyd’s does have a physical home, a spectacular high-rise on London’s Lime Street. Designed to display its pipes, ducts, and other internal systems on the outside, the building resembles nothing so much as a towering oil rig, beached in one of the most historic parts of the British capital. (As an aside, anyone planning to build an actual oil rig would likely insure it at Lloyd’s.) Broadly speaking, Lloyd’s is a ...

Lloyd’s began life as a coffeehouse run by Edward Lloyd, the son of a stocking knitter, in the late seventeenth century, only a few hundred yards from its modern home. At the time, coffeehouses were fashionable, sometimes raucous places for London merchants to conduct business. Over the subsequent decades, Lloyd’s attracted a varied crowd of traders, speculators, gamblers, and con artists, as well as businessmen who funded lucrative sea voyages—and those willing to insure them. (As Lloyd’s acknowledged in a 2020 apology for its role in the trade, many of those journeys were to transport African slaves.) Edward Lloyd recognized the importance of reliable information and realized that if he provided his customers with the latest maritime news, they would have more reason to stay on the premises. That insight led him to create a journal called Lloyd’s List to record the comings and goings of ships. It’s still published today, making it one of the world’s oldest continuously running periodicals.

Before 2007, anyone seen on the floor of Lloyd’s without a jacket and tie risked being thrown out. When the dress code was finally relaxed, there was grumbling among the more traditionally minded members. “It’s the beginning of the end,” one told The Sunday Telegraph. “It’s nearly as bad as when they let women in.” (Women were fully admitted to Lloyd’s only in the 1970s, over bitter opposition from some.)

The central feature of the Lloyd’s building is the Underwriting Room, a vast trading floor at the base of an atrium that rises fourteen stories. The Room, as everyone calls it, takes up most of the ground level, and during the trading day is full of insurers sitting in little wooden booths, waiting for business to find them. The broker working for the owner of the Brillante would have sat down next to the Talbot syndicate representative and provided a piece of paper, or “slip,” detailing the coverage he wanted, along with a file, perhaps sixty pages deep, that contained information about the vessel and its planned voyages. After some discussion of the merits of the contract and its likely risks—an exchange taking normally around twenty minutes and certainly no more than thirty—the satisfied Talbot man would have stamped the slip, initialed it with a fountain pen, and written out the percentage of the liability that his employer was willing to take. 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. And thus, on the floor of Lloyd’s of London, an insurance contract is born.

For all its stuffiness, Lloyd’s has remained dynamic enough to survive scandals, brushes with bankruptcy, and vigorous global competition. The market rewards those brave enough to take a risk. With enough canny decisions, the men sitting in the underwriting booths can earn great fortunes for themselves, as well as the syndicates they represent. Ian Posgate, the top underwriter of the 1970s, earned the nickname “Goldfinger” for the scale of his profits. During the Vietnam War, when ships traveling through the Mekong Delta had to navigate Viet Cong rockets, Posgate hiked his prices and signed his name next to any slip put in front of him. Wars could be lucrative for Lloyd’s, he recognized, as long as customers absorbed the cost of the extra

Hanging inside the wooden frame is the Lutine Bell. 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.

Since 1774, Loss Books have recorded every sinking of a ship insured by the Lloyd’s market, a comprehensive record of nearly 250 years of maritime calamity in every corner of the world.

During the trip back, Mockett contemplated what he’d seen. He’d concluded that the blaze probably began in the vicinity of the Brillante’s engine control room; almost all the spaces above it had been destroyed, while the damage farther down was much less severe. Beyond that assessment, he couldn’t quite make sense of it. The insurers had been told that the pirates had fired rocket-propelled grenades, and Stuart Wallace, Mockett’s client in London, had instructed him to locate and assess the damage from the RPGs. But there was none. Among all the debris and destruction, Mockett could find no sign of even a single RPG strike. Nor had he discovered evidence of the pirates’ having shot up the vessel with guns, which its captain, Noe Gonzaga, had described in his statement after the attack. Nor, as Mockett told Wallace in an email, were there indications that they had detonated hand-thrown grenades, which had also been posited as a cause of the fire. Mockett was a long way from being able to say what exactly had happened to the Brillante the night it was boarded. He did know that if he was going to find out, he had a lot more work to do.

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. The source of the fire was another mystery. Mockett had spoken at length to the tanker’s chief engineer, Nestor Tabares, during their trip out to the Brillante on the fishing trawler. Tabares told Mockett he was asleep when the pirates came aboard and was woken by shouting. He said the intruders had threatened him and forced him into the engine room, where they shot out the windows with a handgun, but Tabares hadn’t seen any grenades and couldn’t explain how the fire began. While Mockett didn’t have any firm theories of his own about what had happened, he told Facey that he couldn’t take the existing story at face value.

As the Brillante casualty made its way through the complex machinery of the Lloyd’s market, more and more people—the ship’s owner, of course, but also salvors, insurers, lawyers, and a host of further experts—had an interest in what Mockett was finding out. The progress of the insurance claim had financial implications for all of them. Wallace’s company, Noble Denton, was compiling Mockett’s reports into more official form for further circulation in London, relaying his difficulties proving out the initial accounts of the attack. “There are no hull punctures from rocket propelled grenades, evidence of a grenade explosion was not seen and there were no readily identifiable bullet holes,” Wallace wrote in one memo. “No further reports as [to] the actions of the alleged boarders have been received. There is no detail as to how they were persuaded to leave the vessel.”

Mockett walked out of his office, down the hall, and past the reception booth in the lobby. The building’s long-forgotten architect had tried to combine crude modernism with Islamic motifs, and Mockett passed under an Ottoman-style arch, rendered in thick concrete, as he entered the bright light of the parking lot. He climbed behind the wheel of his Lexus and turned the key, easing the vehicle past a low metal fence and onto the street. He’d only been driving for a few moments when the bomb that had been carefully placed beneath his seat exploded.

At the scene, the mutual friend had recognized the car, stopped in the middle of a street. A thick billow of smoke rose from the Lexus into the afternoon sky, as a crowd of Yemeni men jostled toward it, shouting and holding up their cellphones to take pictures. The street was thick with pedestrians at that time of day, but none of them appeared to have been harmed despite the obvious power of the blast. The windows and windshield had been blown apart, and the car’s interior had been reduced to a snarl of twisted steel. The subsequent fire had consumed everything that wasn’t metal: the upholstery had disappeared, as had the vehicle’s tires. It rested on the asphalt on its naked wheels. A tall figure lay on the ground by the driver’s seat, blackened grotesquely.

Shipowners and a fleet of enablers, most of them in London, had spent half a century making their world harder to understand, hiding maritime tycoons’ true identities—and their tax and regulatory obligations—within nesting dolls of shell companies. Compared with other sectors, it was remarkably accommodating to such obfuscations. A bank that wanted to finance the construction of an office tower, for example, would do extensive due diligence on the borrower, compiling detailed “know your customer” documentation to comply with mandates from financial regulators. But the insurers who covered ships and voyages at Lloyd’s might have little idea who was ultimately behind the corporate entities they protected. The result was that when something went wrong—a major collision, for example, or a suspected fraud—they were often operating in the dark.

In the City of London, the insurance market was also absorbing the news of Mockett’s death. While there was no direct evidence that the crime was connected to the Brillante, the murder of a key participant in the claims process added to a sense that it might not be an ordinary piracy case. Greater than usual scrutiny seemed to be justified. To better understand the incident, a law firm working for the insurers that covered the Brillante’s hull commissioned a report from a piracy expert, a former soldier who’d helped negotiate ransoms for kidnapped sailors. The expert concluded, based on the limited information available, that it was unlikely to have been Somali pirates who boarded the tanker. Like Bob Boosey, the Royal Navy officer who was roused from his Dubai bedroom on the night of the attack, he pointed out that Somali gangs didn’t generally strike after dark, and that they usually attempted to ransom crews. Why walk away from a multimillion-dollar bounty without taking a single hostage? There were other baffling inconsistencies. According to the crew’s statements, the pirates seemed to be wearing uniforms, and their rifles were clean. Somali teams, by contrast, tended to appear in ragged clothes and carry poorly maintained AK-47s.

When a vessel runs into trouble, its insurers have an interest in preserving as much of its value as possible in order to limit what they ultimately need to pay out. Not surprisingly, Lloyd’s serves as a hub of the salvage world, setting its rules, such as they are, and ironing over the inevitable disputes. The industry’s standard contract is called the Lloyd’s Open Form, which can be agreed over the radio between the captain of a damaged ship and the master of a tug racing to the scene. Later, the compensation the salvor receives from the ship’s insurers may be determined through a Lloyd’s division called the Salvage Arbitration Branch. When it works correctly, the system functions as a virtuous circle. Lloyd’s insurers pay salvors handsomely to save ships and cargoes; with those profits, salvors can buy faster, more powerful tugs and hire even more skilled personnel, allowing them to be more effective rescuers the next time.

While salvage is more regulated today, it’s still a game played only by the toughest, most aggressive seafarers. For obvious reasons, speed is critical. Once they arrive, salvors can go to extreme lengths to secure their possession of a vessel, occasionally even ramming another company’s tug to force it to back off. And while it is expressly forbidden under Lloyd’s regulations, 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. The monetary rewards can be enormous. The basic principle of salvage, rendered in bold capitals on every Lloyd’s Open Form, is: “NO CURE—NO PAY.” Under the industry’s traditional rules, a salvor who fails to save a ship or cargo gets nothing—instead, as a scholar of the industry once described it, “the sea wins.” (More recent changes provide for payment for preventing environmental consequences in some cases, even if a salvage fails in other respects.) A salvor who succeeds, by contrast, is entitled to a substantial proportion of the value he protects, to be shared out among his crew. In the case of a fully loaded tanker or similarly important asset, that may tally to tens of millions of dollars, and the best in the business can afford to live in rock-star luxury, at least for a time.

Amid the explosion of maritime trade in the Victorian era, and the lockstep growth of the Lloyd’s market, the life of the sailor remained absurdly dangerous. In a given year as many as one in five British mariners might die at sea, many on ancient and overloaded ships sent out by avaricious owners with little regard for the consequences. A substantial number of them were “overinsured,” with policies negotiated at Lloyd’s worth far more than their actual value. These vessels were known as “coffin ships” because of the high likelihood of disaster, and not always of the natural kind.

One reason the Lloyd’s market has historically been slow to tackle maritime fraud is that there is no real financial incentive to do so. Even though it costs money to compensate owners for scuttled ships, the market has evolved to respond efficiently to marine accidents, even faked ones, by passing on the cost to someone else. When the number of casualties increases, through an outbreak of war or a spate of frauds, members raise premiums. Indeed, dangerous seas are more profitable, since they mean that customers are more likely to seek the protection of Lloyd’s in the first place.

In 1973, a Greek-owned freighter called the Michael suffered an engine failure in rough seas off Venezuela. A salvage tug arrived, only to find that the freighter’s crew had inexplicably thrown its towing cable overboard, even as the engine room began to flood. A young English lawyer named Michael Baker-Harber was dispatched by Lloyd’s to nearby Curaçao to investigate.

Baker-Harber, who kept a bag always packed in his office for just this sort of assignment, arrived the next morning, in time to see the sailors from the Michael disembark from a rescue boat. He recognized one of them almost immediately, even though the man had recently shaved off his beard. The tall, gaunt figure walking down the gangplank was a ship’s engineer named Stylianos Komiseris. Baker-Harber had sparred with him in a London courtroom months earlier over another suspected scuttling. In that case, Komiseris had spent four days in the witness box, explaining, among other things, why he had declined an offer of help from salvors. Baker-Harber could hardly forget Komiseris, who’d sworn he could only speak Greek but greeted his opponent outside court every day, in perfect English, with a cheery, “Good morning, Mr. Baker-Harber.” Komiseris’s testimony had caused peals of laughter in court. He’d claimed the salvors had simply misunderstood him. He wasn’t saying “No, no!” when they came to his aid. What he’d actually been saying was “Nai, nai!”—Greek for “Yes, yes!” As the two met again, in a tropical harbor more than four thousand miles from London, the English attorney could hardly believe his eyes. When Komiseris spotted Baker-Harber standing on the jetty, he threw up his hands and laughed nervously, exclaiming, “It’s you!” Baker-Harber took some photographs to capture the moment, then pursued Komiseris to a nearby shop, where he cornered the engineer and extracted a wr...

When the lawsuit over the Michael’s insurance policy came to trial, however, the shipowner’s legal team didn’t dispute that it had been scuttled. Instead, they argued, the cause of the sinking was “barratry,” an obscure term for an offense committed by a captain or crew without an owner’s knowledge. Komiseris, they said, had downed the ship to spite the owner, Nestor Pierrakos, over a long-standing personal grievance. Pierrakos was called to court to defend himself. Like many wealthy Greeks, he’d been educated at elite institutions in England, and wore a Cambridge University tie as he testified, indignantly, that he’d never do something so grubby as scuttling a ship. The judge believed him. “No one decides to scuttle a ship lightly; there are too many risks of failure or blackmail or both,” he wrote in his decision. Since barratry was covered by the Michael’s policy, the Lloyd’s insurers were obligated to pay. By establishing a high legal bar for rejecting claims, the ruling made it even harder for the London market to fight suspected fraud. It wasn’t enoug...

In the late 1970s, so many cargo ships were going down in the South China Sea that the Lloyd’s market took the unprecedented step of ordering an inquiry, to be led by the specially appointed Far Eastern Regional Investigation Team, or FERIT. In typical Lloyd’s style, FERIT’s report was kept confidential and was not to be shared with nonmembers, although several historians have written about its contents. More than half of the forty-eight casualties it investigated were deemed “suspicious,” while sixteen were found to be probably the result of scuttling. In all cases, the ships were older and ostensibly loaded with valuable goods: Japanese stereos or, in one instance, about half of Singapore’s annual export volume of cloves. (A port official became suspicious when he noticed that the shipment lacked the distinctive odor that normally accompanied nine hundred tons of spice.) Sometimes the cargo had already been removed and sold in secret before an insurance claim was made. In a few cases it had never existed at all. The cost to the London market of the South China Sea claims alone was estimated at $100 million.

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 lesson, for those at Lloyd’s willing to listen, was that maritime fraud was no longer the preserve of rogue merchants and desperate captains. Gangsters had already built international networks to profit from drug trafficking and human smuggling. Now they had their eyes on the vast pools of money in the global shipping industry.

In January 1980, a British ship came across some lifeboats drifting off the coast of Senegal, next to an abandoned, sinking oil tanker called the Salem. Its Greek captain claimed there had been an explosion on board. The British rescuers fulfilled their obligation to aid fellow mariners, although they found it odd that there were no flames coming from the stricken tanker as it went down, only the faintest trail of smoke, and that the Salem’s fleeing sailors had found time to load its lifeboats with packed suitcases, sandwiches, and cigarettes. The Salem and its documented cargo, 190,000 tons of Kuwaiti light crude oil, were insured at Lloyd’s by more than one hundred syndicates, individuals, and companies, who stood to lose $80 million as a result of its sinking. The claims men in London, though, were immediately suspicious upon learning of the ship’s demise. The Salem’s captain had no master’s certificate, the qualification required to command a ship, and was wanted by the Greek police in relation to other suspected frauds. Even more curiously, the tanker didn’t leave behind an oil slick as it was swallowed by the sea. There didn’t seem to have been any crude in its cargo tanks. What emerged after police investigations in several countries was an ingenious multinational fraud, the largest ever attempted at sea up to that point. One of its prime movers was a Lebanese-American businessman named Fred Soudan, who helped engineer a complex scheme to deliver oil to South Africa...

For most of its history, the money behind the market came from “Names,” the moniker given at Lloyd’s to private individuals who pooled their wealth into underwriting syndicates. In theory, Names bore unlimited liability for losses: if claims were large enough, they could be forced to give up everything they owned. But in practice, premiums usually exceeded claims by a comfortable margin, and Names received excellent returns. The group included British dukes, baronets, members of the landed gentry, banking scions such as the Rothschilds, and commercial dynasties including the Guinness family. The Lloyd’s market was, in effect, an invitation-only investment club for preserving wealth and privilege. From the 1960s, a series of scandals and expensive natural disasters led to a liquidity crisis among the syndicates. To raise more funds, Lloyd’s eased its membership requirements, welcoming the not-so-blue-blooded as Names, including sports stars, musicians—notably, the members of Pink Floyd—and thousands of dentists, doctors, and small-town stockbrokers. But it still wasn’t enough to feed the world’s growing appetite for insurance, not just for ships, but for planes, nuclear power stations, and spacecraft. So in 1994, the leadership of Lloyd’s allowed companies to serve as Names for the first time. The arrival of American and Swiss conglomerates vastly increased the capital available for syndicates to write insurance policies. It also changed the fundamental nature of the place....

As he reviewed the files at his desk, Veale noticed that some of them had been signed by an individual whose name he hadn’t seen before: a man called Marios Iliopoulos. Iliopoulos had also offered personal loan guarantees. Based on that fact, Veale told Cunningham, he had a “high level of confidence” that Iliopoulos was the Brillante’s ultimate owner. When Cunningham heard the name, the Talbot executive nearly fell off his chair. “That’s the bloke from the Elli!” he exclaimed. The Elli was a tanker that had run aground off the coast of Yemen in 2009, after a fire broke out in its radio room. Talbot was part of the syndicate insuring its hull. A salvage team eventually towed the Elli away for repairs, but while they were in the process of pumping water into its ballast tanks for stability, the tanker suffered what lawyers called a “catastrophic hogging” near the Suez Canal. In layman’s terms, the ship’s bow and stern halves had sheared apart midway down the hull, splitting in two like a watermelon.

In the first months of 2012, there was every chance the hull insurers would ignore the warning signs and pay the Brillante claim, just as the Lloyd’s market had done with countless other suspicious casualties over the years. In that scenario, Iliopoulos would have taken the money, satisfied his creditors, and carried on squeezing profit out of his aging fleet. Veale would have gone back to tracing pirates’ bank accounts, or whatever else came across his desk at EBIS. Talbot would have split the cost with the other nine insurers named on the war risks policy and barely noticed the loss. The real story of what happened to the Brillante Virtuoso might never have emerged. But the hull syndicate, led by Talbot, decided not to pay, at least not yet. Veale wasn’t part of the discussion and couldn’t be sure of exactly what swayed their deliberations. Perhaps it was the sheer size of the potential loss: more than $70 million, and set to grow larger with additional costs and lost income. Perhaps it was the existence of the Elli dispute, which was still being litigated and might yield proof that a fraud had been committed. Or perhaps, as Veale later came to believe, David Mockett’s death had shocked the Lloyd’s market into a rare moment of conscience.

Veale had known Michael Conner for thirty years, since they’d begun working together in London’s Metropolitan Police. When Veale called him in late 2012, Conner was at the end of a distinguished career, serving most recently as a detective chief inspector in the small agency responsible for law enforcement in the British military. Veale asked his friend how he was. “I’m retired now, Dick,” Conner said, in a tone that suggested he was reluctant to get pulled into whatever Veale might be getting in touch about. He was sixty and recovering from an eight-hour heart operation, no doubt related to the toll of four decades pursuing gangsters, fraudsters, drug traffickers, and pedophiles. His first marriage had also fallen apart, but Conner wasn’t bitter. He considered himself fortunate to have been given the opportunity to pit himself against “arseholes,” as he described the criminals he faced. It was his life’s work, and he was exceptionally good at it. Though he stood just over five feet tall and had the deeply lined face of a man nearing pension age, Conner could still end an argument with little more than a hard stare from his glacier-blue eyes. At the Met, his colleagues called him Metal Mickey—both for the toughness of his leathery, muscular frame and his unyielding personality—and his misshapen knuckles suggested that he wasn’t someone you wanted to offend.

Matters came to a head in the spring of 2013. Jull was visiting sources in Jordan when he learned about a “market meeting” to be held at Lloyd’s the next day. The purpose of the gathering was to decide what to do about the Brillante. Both the tanker’s cargo and hull insurers would be represented, but the most pressing matter was whether to honor the salvage claim, which fell on Jull’s clients.

About thirty attendees were seated around a long conference table. Behind them, a window displayed a sweeping view of the London skyline, its historic spires competing for attention with modern monuments to international finance. The most important members of the cargo syndicate were RSA Insurance Group (formerly Royal and Sun Alliance), Zurich Insurance Group, and Allianz, three industry behemoths with combined assets of more than $1 trillion. All had sent senior executives. Also present were Talbot’s Paul Cunningham and other members of the hull syndicate, alongside a supporting cast of attorneys, accountants, and investigators.

Talbot and the hull syndicate decided not to change course. They would continue to pursue a defensive legal strategy against Marios Iliopoulos, the Brillante’s owner, while searching for concrete evidence of fraud. But a few weeks after the market meeting, RSA, Zurich, and Allianz quietly settled with the salvors, writing out a check for $34 million. Some in the cargo syndicate were disgusted at how easily their colleagues had given up.

Veale and Conner’s clients, however, appeared strangely unmoved by the new evidence they were turning up. The person who seemed least impressed was Chris Zavos, the punctilious attorney leading the legal team for Talbot and the other hull insurers. A graduate of St. Paul’s, an ultraprestigious private school on the banks of the Thames, he was the detectives’ temperamental opposite in almost every way, and the differences seemed to become more pronounced the longer they worked together. In meetings, Zavos spoke with the precise cadence of a man ever attentive to how his words might be interpreted, and was often accompanied by another lawyer who would take copious notes, as though anticipating that any conversation might have to be cited in court.

Veale was still surprised that the underwriters weren’t ready to fight Iliopoulos. He kept returning to the same principle: if his and Conner’s suspicions were correct, a substantial fraud, one of the biggest in maritime history, had been committed against the Lloyd’s market, and paying out would only incentivize more of the same. It would also put legitimate funds into the hands of the people responsible—settlement proceeds that could be deposited at virtually any bank in the world, hassle free. In Veale’s former line of work there were words for that kind of behavior, and he was certain that respectable Lloyd’s members would never want them used to describe how they did business. He

Late in 2013, Veale arrived for a meeting at Talbot’s offices across from the neoclassical Royal Exchange, where Lloyd’s was housed through the nineteenth century. About fifteen people took their places around a large conference room table: representatives of the Brillante’s insurers as well as their lawyers, there to discuss the latest developments in the case. After the lawyers spoke, explaining the finer points of litigation procedure, it was Veale’s turn to present, and he pulled up a PowerPoint presentation on a wall-mounted screen. He was supposed to be giving a synopsis of his investigation’s progress so far, as well as a rundown of next steps. But in the middle of the deck, he’d inserted a slide that wasn’t strictly part of the work he was being paid to do. It contained just one image: David Mockett’s burned-out car, photographed just after the bombing that killed him. “It’s important to remember,” Veale said to the group. “A really decent man was murdered.”

The quantum trial, which was held in November and December 2014, ended with a decisive defeat for the underwriters. In a decision handed down the following January, the judge, Julian Flaux, ruled that even though it hadn’t sunk as a result of the attack, the Brillante had been rendered a “constructive total loss.” As far as the legal system was concerned, it would be treated as though it were on the bottom of the ocean, irretrievable. Flaux said he was unimpressed by the allegations made by the insurers up to that point, including that Iliopoulos and his agents had exaggerated the Brillante’s damage and what it would cost to repair, and racked up unnecessary expenses along the way. Those were small-fry arguments, given the scale of what had occurred, and Flaux seemed to sense that the insurers were holding back. Once, during the court proceedings, he’d observed that they were “willing to wound, yet afraid to strike.” The ruling meant that if Iliopoulos prevailed in the second trial, which would decide what caused the fire on the Brillante and who was to blame, the firms that insured the tanker stood to lose as much as $85 million. That would be a very large bill, even at Lloyd’s—and Veale and Conner believed it gave them an opening. The detectives argued that it was time for the insurers to finally get aggressive, by filing a civil fraud case and doing everything they could to help the police pursue Iliopoulos criminally. They still met resistance.

Conner’s relationship with Zavos was even worse. 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. What bothered Conner most was the way Zavos waved away his references to Mockett’s death, dismissing it as irrelevant to the litigation. In the legal sense, that was an entirely accurate statement. But to Conner, it couldn’t have been more mistaken in the moral one. He found he could barely spend time with Zavos without getting fed up. In his irritation, he began staring intensely at the lawyer during meetings, a habit so unnerving to Zavos that he asked Veale to make Conner stop. The

In a meeting at Lloyd’s to discuss the case, representatives of the NCA, the City of London Police, and Financial Conduct Authority—the UK’s main financial-market watchdog—stressed that insurers had a legal obligation to prevent fraud and money laundering, one they needed to ensure that they were honoring. Some of the government officials had been surprised to learn that 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.

In the spring of that year, the insurers filed new documents at London’s High Court, revealing a dramatic change in strategy. To Veale and Conner’s delight, the members of the Brillante syndicate had agreed to accuse Iliopoulos of fraud, and sought permission to make that argument at the second trial—the one that would determine if they had to pay up. “There was no attack by Somali pirates,” they said in their new pleadings. In fact, they went on, “Any such attack on the vessel was staged with the involvement and connivance of the owner,” and members of the crew: Captain Gonzaga, who’d ordered the ship to drift and given permission for the supposed pirates to come aboard, and Chief Engineer Tabares, who’d been alone with the intruders in the engine room. Drawing on the reports they commissioned from explosives experts, the underwriters claimed the fire that gutted the Brillante “was initiated by an explosive incendiary device,” planted by people “acting on the instructions of the owner.” Iliopoulos had been deeply in debt, they argued, giving him a strong incentive to destroy a vessel that carried insurance far in excess of its economic value.

“Underwriters have from an early stage been extremely suspicious of the cause of the casualty,” Zavos wrote. But despite those misgivings, they “would have wished to avoid making this allegation, if it was not necessary to do so, e.g. 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. There it was, Veale remarked to himself: a clear statement of the priorities at Lloyd’s.

Iliopoulos received his summons at his office in Piraeus, opposite the ferry terminal where he’d built much of his fortune. Centered on a hook-shaped peninsula extending southwest from central Athens, the city of 160,000 is the undisputed center of Greece’s shipping industry. Along its densely packed commercial blocks are the offices of virtually every one of the country’s maritime tycoons. That, in turn, makes Piraeus the ship-owning capital of the world. Roughly 18 percent of the worldwide merchant fleet is Greek owned, a volume wildly out of proportion to the country’s overall economy, which is barely among the twenty largest in Europe. The marine assets controlled from Piraeus dwarf those held by Japan, with 11 percent of the total, and the US, with just 3 percent.

There’s no single explanation for how a small group of businesspeople from a country of 11 million citizens, with no other globally competitive industries, came to exert such outsize power over seaborne commerce. Geography plays a role, of course. Spread across some two hundred inhabited islands, in an archipelago stretching five hundred miles from Corfu to Rhodes, Greeks have depended since antiquity on marine transport. Some of the longer-lived Hellenic shipping dynasties got their start with short runs in the Aegean and Mediterranean, shifting gradually into longer, transoceanic journeys. A history of emigration is also a factor. Ethnically Greek communities have existed since the nineteenth century or earlier in countries like Egypt and Ukraine, predating the more recent waves of arrivals in New York, London, and other world cities. Those widely dispersed populations provided a ready commercial network in key ports, linked by blood, language, and culture to the business community at home.

Much of the trade they exploited was in oil. As cars became mass-market conveniences in Europe and North America, crude went from the periphery of the shipping business to its very center. In an earlier era, ships collected their cargoes in industrial cities—Liverpool, Philadelphia, Montreal. In the new automobile age, the most important loading ports would include places like Mina Al Ahmadi, in Kuwait, and Ras Tanura, on the edge of Saudi Arabia’s seemingly limitless oil fields. Sixty percent of the growth in maritime trade between 1948 and 1973 was in “liquid cargo,” overwhelmingly petroleum and products related to it. Moving larger quantities of oil over longer distances required a huge increase in tanker capacity, which a pair of Greek operators were particularly eager to provide. Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis, the most prominent shipping tycoons of the postwar era, arguably deserve more credit than anyone for the development of the supertanker, which transformed the energy business after its introduction in the 1950s. Contemporaries and bitter rivals, Niarchos and Onassis competed to build the fanciest yachts and to wed the most beautiful women (one of whom, the maritime heiress Tina Livanos, they both ultimately married). They vied to dominate the tanker trade, commissioning larger and larger ships that would dramatically cut the cost of carrying each barrel between continents.

The very first vessel to be registered under Liberia’s flag was the World Peace, a Niarchos-owned tanker that entered the nominal jurisdiction of that West African state in 1949. He and Onassis quickly became some of the most enthusiastic users of so-called flags of convenience, which allowed them to escape the rules on maintenance, inspections, and sailors’ wages that prevailed in the Western world. As with their other innovations, this one was quickly adopted by the rest of the Piraeus shipping fraternity. By 1959, over half the “Liberian” merchant fleet was owned by Greeks, who also piled into the Panamanian registry.