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

by Matthew Campbell

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.