by Eskil Engdal
“Where are all the passports? I don’t believe that you don’t have them,” he says.
Cataldo shakes his head.
“I am the captain. I am the authority on board,” Chakravarty says.
“You know the rules. The international laws,” Cataldo answers.
“These are the Sam Simon rules.”
On the quarterdeck the Sea Shepherd crew wearing white rubber gloves inspect the bags and suitcases of the shipwrecked seamen who climb on board. Nobody has a passport or seaman’s book with them, but Chakravarty doubts that they are gone.
He continues to put pressure on Cataldo, who complains that his crew were left stranded on the ocean for far too long before they were rescued and that they became seasick and cold.
“Can I check your pockets?” Chakravarty asks.
“OK. Can I have communication with my family?” Cataldo asks.
“We will drop you off in São Tomé. You can communicate from there,” Chakravarty answers.
“Very important to talk to my family, but por favor, no camera,” Cataldo requests.
Chakravarty does not want to let Cataldo borrow the satellite phone; he suspects that the captain of the Thunder wants to call somebody else entirely than his family in Chile.
Again Cataldo starts to ask if there are other ships nearby.
“We are the only option. No one else is coming,” Chakravarty says.
“Where’s the merchant ship that Bob Barker talked about?” Cataldo asks.
“There is no other ship. We have tried for a British warship and the Nigerian Navy. No one else will come.”
“OK. OK,” Cataldo answers, and then recalls that he left his sunglasses in his cabin on the Sam Simon.
Now he wants them back.
Chakravarty goes up to the bridge to speak with his officers.
“Phew! The captain is intense. He is a bit touchy about being locked in his cabin,” he says before returning to the quarterdeck to resume the conversation with Cataldo.
Now he is standing with the logbook from the Thunder in his hand. It was found in the bag of one of the other officers, and Cataldo demanded that it be given to him. Chakravarty wants to see it, but Cataldo refuses.
“What is this? Security, security. This book is personal for the ship. For me and the company. Log book, position, navigation,” he says and asks Chakravarty to calm down.
“Don’t tell me how to run the security on my ship,” Chakravarty answers in irritation.
He never receives the Thunder’s log book but when the crew of the Sam Simon go through the contents of a black waste bag that first mate Juan Antonio Olveira Brion has brought up onto the quarterdeck, they find all the passports for the crew. Captain Cataldo continues to refuse to hand over the passports and Chakravarty would prefer not to use force against the crew of the Thunder, who outnumber them, even though there has not been much indication that Cataldo has enough authority over his crew to order a mutiny. A Nigerian military plane is also circling above the site of the shipwreck. Chakravarty has asked the pilot to fly low over the Sam Simon a couple of times. He explains to the crew of the Thunder that the military plane is on site to help with clearance of the crew.
Captain Cataldo continues to insist on borrowing the satellite telephone. And it is not his family he is going to call now, but a ship agent in São Tomé.
“I make the calls. It’s my ship,” Chakravarty replies.
“You need to understand for me. I need to call to my agency. Two minutes. Three minutes. Finished,” Cataldo asks in his broken English.
“The ship agency is not going to come to rescue you. It is you and me.”
“My idea is very, very good,” Cataldo responds.
With his passport in his pocket and an obliging assistant on shore, Cataldo still sees an opportunity to escape. He has to speak with the local ship agent to ensure that a speedy exit from the African island has been planned, an island which on the map resembles nothing more than a pinhead far out in the Gulf of Guinea.
“No agency,” Chakravarty says.
“Your ship has sunk, my ship is still floating.”
38
THE ISLAND OF RUMOURS
SÃO TOMÉ AND PRÍNCIPE, APRIL 2015
São Tomé and Príncipe is the island of rumours.
The rumours fly from the small shacks that serve cheap beer along Rua 3 Fevereiro, they are catapulted through the enthusiastic clamour of messengers and offers at the marketplace, they multiply and spread outside the always muddy station for the New York-yellow taxis and continue on into the comfortably air-conditioned Café Central with its sweet baked goods and dark, bitter coffee. Once in a while the rumours penetrate the porous walls of the courthouse and legislative assembly and perhaps the presidential palace. The rumours are tales of corruption and fraud, of ordinary family dramas, incredible fishing expeditions, terrible fishing expeditions, business opportunities and run of the mill meanness and idle gossip.
The rumour about Wilson Morais is that he is a robber and a murderer who killed one of the money changers at the bus station and that he later drove around the streets of São Tomé with the corpse seated in the passenger seat. He did this, also according to the rumours, up until the excursion came to an end with a long-term stay in the city’s only jail.
What can be confirmed about Wilson Morais with certainty is that together with his father he runs the bustling and apparently successful shipping agency Ecuador, and that he is a street smart, at times very jovial, but also secretive man with good contacts and knowledge of most of what is going on in São Tomé.
In mid-March, Morais received a phone call from Spain. A fishing vessel was on its way to São Tomé and they needed assistance. Ecuador had formerly taken on assignments from Spanish fisheries companies without asking too many questions and he accepted the commission. A few days later an email arrived containing details about the ship’s owner, the company Royal Marine & Spares, explaining that the trawler the Thunder would be arriving at the island state for maintenance and a crew rotation. Morais was sent the necessary ship’s documents and crew lists to clear the ship’s arrival and acquire visas, hotel rooms and airline tickets for the crew.1
It was a wholly ordinary commission for a ship agent. It was more out of the ordinary that the ship owner also wanted to flag the ship in São Tomé.
Only a dozen ships have their home port on the island state’s black-listed ship’s register. Morais contacted the coast guard to arrange the papers and formalities so the Thunder could be assigned a new home port.
While Morais waited for the client to sail into São Tomé harbour, he received a phone call from the harbour master, who told him that as unbelievable as it might seem, the ship was about to sink. Wilson Morais immediately jumped into action and called up another ship in the area to organize a rescue operation but soon learned that a vessel was already in place and the situation under control.
The rest of the day he prepared for the crew’s arrival and had time for merely a few restless hours of sleep before he had to drive down to the harbour and jump on board the coast guard vessel that would bring the shipwrecked seamen to land.
In the darkness, a short distance away from the perfect, half-moon shaped Ana Chaves Bay, which forms the approach to São Tomé, he could make out the silhouette of a ship with a camouflage pattern on the hull and a cartoonish wolf-jaw on the bow. The 55-metre-long Sam Simon made São Tomé’s modest coast guard vessel the Águia – the Eagle – look pitiful.
While the enlisted seamen stood by with one hand on the rail of the Águia and the other on their automatic weapons, Wilson Morais hopped on board the Sam Simon. He went straight to the Thunder’s captain and fishing captain and in a peaceful corner of the ship he told them that minivans would transport the shipwrecked crew to luxury hotels near the airport.
Fishing captain L
ampon sat down and ducking his head, packed his few belongings. Chakravarty had asked the photographers of the Sam Simon to watch over Lampon with particular care. The latter was the only one of the Spanish officers who wore a wristwatch on his right arm, as had “the Balaclava Man”, the man who had thrown the chain length and steel pipe at the Sea Shepherd crew.
But Lampon had had enough of all the attention. He stood up, looked directly into a camera, reached out his arms and exclaimed loudly “puta mierda” – bloody cunt.
Then he climbed into the coast guard vessel without saying a word to the crew who had rescued him.
The ship owner’s representative in Spain had given Wilson Morais instructions to get the officers of the Thunder out of the country as quickly as possible. The tickets for Lisbon were already booked. The next evening at 7 PM, they would mingle with the tourists at São Tomé and Príncipe’s international airport and be lifted out of their lives’ worst nightmare.
If everything went according to plan.
39
48 HOURS
SÃO TOMÉ AND PRÍNCIPE, APRIL 2015
He is awakened with a start by the telephone. The public prosecutor Kelve Nobre de Carvalho glances quickly at the clock and establishes that it is five in the morning. On the other end of the line is São Tomé’s chief of police; he seems clearly elated. The police station is full of foreigners from a shipwreck, he explains.
Kelve Nobre de Carvalho finds his glasses and puts on a shirt, trousers and shoes and before getting into his car he has time to down a quick cup of coffee and give clipped responses to his wife’s questions.
“There’s been a shipwreck,” he replies.
The air is still cool when he gets into his car and drives the few kilometres between his home and the police station. Beneath the almond trees on the esplanade he sees women balancing woven baskets and plastic tubs containing fruit and vegetables on their heads; from time to time he glimpses the shadows of the first morning joggers. Now and then the headlamps are reflected in the pupils of vagrant stray dogs. Life starts early in the morning in São Tomé, before the all-consuming heat descends upon the island.
The sight that greets him at the police station in the capital São Tomé surprises him. Several of the shipwrecked seamen are well-dressed; the majority of them even look happy. The Asians smile and joke. The rest of them, whom Nobre de Carvalho presumes come from Europe, are more aloof.
The young public prosecutor has never heard of the Thunder wanted by Interpol or the chase that has been underway at sea for almost four months. Life as a public prosecutor in Africa’s second smallest country with a mere 200,000 residents is comfortable and laid-back. One out of three residents lives in São Tomé, the only densely populated area on the two islands that can be called a city. Here Nobre De Carvalho investigates three or four murders per year, a few robberies and a corrupt politician or two. And then there are the constant banana thefts.
The first thing he does is to collect the passports of the shipwrecked seamen, then he asks the local Interpol contact to check whether arrest warrants have been issued for any of the seamen. Then he fingerprints them.
To keep the crew on the island, Nobre de Carvalho must open a criminal case and for the time being he has no opinion about whether the seamen he has before him are the victims of a shipwreck or if they have committed some kind of crime. He is at a loss. In the course of 48 hours he must decide whether he will let the crew go or open a formal investigation. The latter option is the most difficult. The crime scene is lying at the bottom of the ocean.
At the police station he also meets Wilson Morais, the secretive ship agent who is the one in São Tomé who knows the most about the Thunder. Morais has bought sandwiches, mineral water, cigarettes, juice, cakes and biscuits for the crew. In the afternoon, after the preliminary, fumbling interviews, Morais will transport the shipwrecked seamen to the hotels by the airport. The next day he will drive the crew to the island’s only airport and put them on a plane to Lisbon and freedom. But the armed policemen who are monitoring the seamen’s movements at the hotels and the ambitious public prosecutor’s involvement give Morais a disturbing feeling that his plan will go up in smoke. For the time being that is a thought he keeps to himself.
Perhaps it is a coincidence that determines the fate of the Thunder’s crew in São Tomé. The business lawyer Pieter van Welzen from the Netherlands is sitting in the shade by the swimming pool of the five star hotel Pestana near São Tomé’s esplanade when he reads the first article about the wreck of the Thunder.
After having spent a holiday in São Tomé and Príncipe on an impulse many years ago, he fell in love with the peaceful group of islands. The multilingual van Welzen is now São Tomé’s consul in the Netherlands, co-owner of a culture centre on the island and in the process of building a house in the capital. He has also become a kind of mentor for the younger public prosecutor, Nobre de Carvalho, whom he finds to be sharp, committed and fearless and among the few in São Tomé who dare to challenge the small power elite in the country.
On the Internet, van Welzen sees that the wreck of the Thunder has made the international news. He doubts that his friend the public prosecutor understands the kind of complicated case that sailed in during the night. The public prosecutor has done criminal investigations of thefts, but never illegal fishing, he has investigated corruption, but never human trafficking and environmental crime. He fears that the case could prove to be an ordeal for his friend.
If the authorities in São Tomé are going to investigate the shipwreck, they must quickly establish contact with Interpol. And they must get hold of witnesses of the incident – Sea Shepherd, van Welzen thinks. From the hotel he writes an email to Sea Shepherd’s European headquarters in his own home town of Amsterdam and offers to assist with the case. The next day he receives an answer from Captain Sid Chakravarty on the Sam Simon.
“The best thing to do at this stage would be to send a message to Interpol in Lyon,” Chakravarty writes, and includes the phone number of the Interpol agent Mario, who he knows is ready to move out.
“It would be incredibly important for Interpol to investigate the Captain and Fishing Master before they leave. The ownership of the Thunder must be established before these men disappear and Interpol is waiting for the invitation to assist,” he writes in the email.
After Pieter van Welzen has briefed him and the Director General of Public Prosecution about the case, public prosecutor Kelve Nobre de Carvalho decides to start an investigation. It would have been simpler to drop it. It is not their ship, not their crew, not their company and the Thunder has not been fishing in São Tomé’s waters. But he has witnesses and after the Director General of Public Prosecution called the telephone number they received from Sid Chakravarty, Interpol’s Incident Response Team is on its way.
The Wednesday flight to Lisbon takes off without the crew of the Thunder on board. At the hotels the shipwrecked seamen are starting to get nervous. They sleep in soft beds, splash around in the swimming pools and the ship owners have sent money for new clothes and toiletries, but they still have armed police on their heels. In the evenings dangers both real and imagined are mixed up in confused discussions: prison and yellow fever, Interpol and malaria.
Several of the Thunder’s officers know that the ship was wanted by Interpol, but how much does the young public prosecutor know about them? The local defence attorney hired by the ship agent Morais tries to reassure them, first with a yellow fever vaccine, then cautious optimism.
“Everyone will be able to travel home soon,” he says.
For three of the officers of the Thunder life will soon turn pitch-dark.
40
THREE CONDEMNED MEN
SÃO TOMÉ AND PRÍNCIPE, APRIL 2015
Five days after the wreck of the Thunder, three Interpol agents land in São Tomé. The team is led by the energetic Portuguese agent Mario, who h
as followed the voyage of the Thunder from the moment the ship was found until it sank. With him from Lyon he has a specialist in human trafficking and from Lisbon a policewoman who speaks fluent Indonesian.
The agents are not authorized to wave hand guns around, interrogate suspects or force anyone into handcuffs. They don’t arrest people, don’t operate prisons, don’t own the intelligence information they collect and cannot make statements on behalf of the member countries. When an Interpol agent appears at a crime scene, he is there to assist the local police.
Interpol’s Project Scale will for the first time assist a nation in bringing up criminal charges against fishing pirates.
After having informed himself of the details of the local investigation, the Interpol agent sees that just about everything has been done incorrectly. The interrogations of the Thunder crew are superficial; the police have asked the deck crew, chief engineer and captain all the same simple questions. In several of the interrogations the suspect’s country of origin was not even established. But what really puzzles him is the arrangement of the furniture in the interview room. Where the suspect is supposed to sit, there is a tall chair. Where the policeman is supposed to sit, there is a lower chair. It’s almost as if the crew of the Thunder are being treated like celebrity guests, not like suspects in a criminal case, they think.
In the subsequent interrogations, the crew and officers will be gathered in a big room and nobody is to know who will be interrogated or when. When an interrogation is finished, the suspect is to be led out of the building without having the possibility to speak with those who are still waiting.
The public prosecutor Nobre de Carvalho witnesses how the Interpol team first goes to work on the furnishings. Pictures and other removable objects on the walls that can be used as a weapon are taken down. The Indonesians are to be interviewed as witnesses and the room and the atmosphere is to be pleasant and relaxing. With the officers, it will be different. They are suspects and the atmosphere in the room must be serious and oppressive. They will sit on hard, low chairs. And between the suspect and head of interrogation there will be a solid table that is wide enough to prevent the suspect from throwing a punch.