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

by Matthew Campbell

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.