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

by Matthew Campbell

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...