by Eskil Engdal
They start by interviewing the Indonesian crew. Both Sea Shepherd and an expert in human trafficking from the University of Auckland have alleged that the crew may be victims of involuntary servitude. Although the Interpol team doesn’t believe the allegations, they must be checked out. A ship owner who wants a crew to sail to the most remote and dangerous maritime regions on the planet wants loyal seamen he can trust, capable and experienced men who know how to work effectively in the inhospitable climate of Antarctica, Mario thinks.
In the course of the interviews it becomes clear that the Indonesians are not victims of human trafficking. They have received wages, they have posted messages on Facebook, and they have communicated with their families in Indonesia. The Interpol investigators find no evidence of the Indonesian crew having been subjected to any criminal violations.
When the fishing captain Juan Manuel Patiño Lampon enters the interrogation room, he is wearing reading glasses, shorts, flip-flops and a T-shirt.
This is the moment the investigators have been looking forward to.
Lampon is tall, corpulent and has beard stubble. His facial expression is impenetrable and his gaze is so full of rage that the investigators believe he will soon break down and cry. Lampon sits down on the edge of his chair, as if he is preparing to make a quick exit or for a tussle. When he is offered a bottle of water, he declines with a hand movement.
Sixty-one-year-old Juan Manuel Patiño Lampon has been shaped by more than 40 years at sea; he is a proud and uncompromising fisherman and the Thunder’s alpha male. It is the man who wears his watch on his right wrist, the way “the Balaclava man” did, and who in the course of four months has not said anything but “puta mierda” – bloody cunt – to Sea Shepherd. He was the man who made the important decisions and decided where they would sail and fish.
First, the investigators will compliment Lampon on the gillnets he has constructed. When Mario met the Sea Shepherd ship the Sam Simon in Mauritius a mere two months before, he studied the nets Lampon deployed in the Banzare Bank. He was impressed with the construction and knows that the Thunder’s fishing captain is a master of the craft. The best fishing captains leave their signature on the 15–20 kilometre-long nets, which are spliced together to catch as many fish as possible and simultaneously to make them easy for the crew to handle. For a fisheries investigator, the net construction can tell him just as much about the perpetrator as DNA on a bloodstained carpet can tell a homicide investigator.
After having warmed Lampon up with the compliment, they will get him to admit that he has been fishing illegally. That is the strategy.
Before each interrogation of the officers, Mario has prepared 40 questions, depending upon the kind of role the suspect had on the Thunder. Now he takes head of interrogation Nobre de Carvalho out into the hallway and tells the young and inexperienced public prosecutor that they must throw out the manuscript and devise a new plan. After having read Lampon’s body language, the Interpol agent understands that he won’t tell them anything of value if they confront him aggressively. He knows the omertà culture from which the fishing captain comes. They must try to set a trap.
Back in the interrogation room, Nobre de Carvalho first asks open and harmless questions in an attempt to get Lampon to relax.
“How many times have you sailed with the Thunder?” he asks.
“This was the first,” Lampon answers.
This was the answer they had been hoping for. The Interpol agent snaps to attention and starts leafing through the folder of intelligence information he has brought from Lyon. Inside it there is a crew list showing that Lampon has been on at least three trips with the Thunder. His first answer is a bald-faced lie. Kelve Nobre de Carvalho repeats the question, this time slowly enough so it cannot be misunderstood.
When Lampon gives the same answer, the Interpol agent sees an opportunity to make him crack. He leans toward Nobre de Carvalho and says loudly:
“We must start a criminal case against Captain Cataldo. He claims that Lampon has been on more than one voyage. The captain has clearly lied and wronged Lampon’s name.”
The investigators receive the response they were hoping for. The fishing captain asks for a chance to change his answer. He has been on several voyages, he admits.
Then he starts talking about the missions, the nets and the fishing. This is information that can be useful if the Spanish authorities should decide to investigate Lampon, but which won’t have any consequences for the fishing captain in São Tomé. He hasn’t been fishing in São Tomé’s waters and the country has no laws enabling the court to penalize a foreign citizen for fishing illegally in international waters. Therefore, they allow Lampon to travel home to Ribeira.
Even though he is the ship owner’s and the fishing master’s puppet, it is Captain Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo who is legally responsible for the ship.
“Investigate the case as a suspicious accident, not as illegal fishing,” is the advice Nobre de Carvalho receives from the Interpol agent.
The young public prosecutor must find the person responsible for sinking the ship and the pollution of São Tomé’s waters. Then he must find the person against whom criminal charges can be brought for the ship’s sailing under forged papers. Who will be allowed to leave and who must stay is already becoming clear to Nobre de Carvalho.
From the luxury hotel Pestana first engineer Luis Miguel Pérez Fernández posts photographs of himself in the swimming pool on Facebook. “Qué bonito” – how lovely – his wife at home in Ribeira comments. In his home town, friends and family “like” the picture of the man they haven’t seen in almost five months. But suddenly the first engineer stops publishing updates from his life in the tropics. While 37 of the Thunder’s crew are granted permission to leave São Tomé, the passports of Pérez Fernández, chief engineer Agustín Dosil Rey and Captain Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo are confiscated.
They are informed that they cannot leave the island.
Captain Cataldo makes a final attempt to extract himself from the problems. Alone and unannounced, he turns up at the office of the public prosecutor Nobre de Carvalho and tells him that he has a family at home in Chile, that he is an ordinary man who is trying to feed his wife and children. He didn’t know anything about the documents being forgeries, he claims. When this doesn’t work, he tries to place the blame for the shipwreck on the engineers, but the public prosecutor doesn’t believe the Chilean captain’s stories.
In São Tomé it is said that the conditions in the prison are so favourable that if you are gaunt going in, you will be fattened up by the time you leave. This is meagre comfort for three forsaken men.
During the investigation of the Thunder shipwreck, disturbing things begin to occur in the life of public prosecutor Kelve Nobre de Carvalho. On his way to work at eight o’clock in the morning, the domestic servant calls and tells him that some strangers are inside his house. In the bedroom she found the public prosecutor’s suits torn out of the wardrobe and strewn across the floor. Beside the pile of clothes was a one-litre tin of petrol. Somebody wanted to burn the house down, but the domestic servant surprised the intruder, who ran off. In the weeks that follow two policemen sleep in the public prosecutor’s house.
One week later he is awakened at night by the sound of splintering glass. When he goes out onto the dimly lit square in front of the house, he sees that the windscreen on his car has been smashed.
There is a dog lying on the ground with a broken leg. That could of course have been a coincidence.
41
THE LUCK OF THE DRAW
CAPE VERDE, MAY 2015
At the end of May Peter Hammarstedt is in Cape Verde, where Sea Shepherd has one of its permanent bases. In the Porto Grande Bay outside the city of Mindelo he notices a ship. Hammarstedt loves ship stories and every time he sees a vessel he wants to know more about, he jots down the name – Itziar II. Then he Googles
it.
The stories he reads about the Itziar II are astonishing. The ship rocking peacefully in the turquoise water outside Mindelo has been blacklisted for 12 years for illegal fishing in the Southern Ocean. Hammarstedt realizes that the Itziar II could have been one of “The Bandit 6”.
A dinghy transports him out to the ship. The windows are broken, the hull is shedding rust, there are piles of woodwork on the deck and the interior has been ripped out. Local fishermen who paddle past in a canoe tell him that the ship has now been taken over by Mindelo’s vagrants. In the evening they often see a fire lit on deck.
Hammarstedt sends an email to Interpol and tells them about the find, and then he takes a taxi to the airport. As he is driving down the coastal motorway along the Porto Grande Bay, he looks out toward the decrepit pirate to bid a final farewell, but now there is another ship in the water beside it. It is painted white and has brownish-orange streaks of rust running down the hull from the scuppers. There is something about the profile of the ship; he is sure he has seen it before, many times, while he was preparing for the search for “The Bandit 6”.
Before he boards the plane to Lisbon, he calls one of the Sea Shepherd activists in Mindelo and asks him to take a dinghy out into the bay to take a photograph of the ship.
“Make sure that nobody sees you!” he warns.
When Hammarstedt lands, he goes straight to the hotel and checks his email. He studies the photographs from Cape Verde, then he checks Interpol’s website. There is another name on the ship that was photographed just outside Mindelo, but he is certain that it is the Songhua, one of “The Bandit 6”.
He calls the fisheries officer Gary Orr, New Zealand’s man in Operation Spillway. When a groggy voice answers the phone, he remembers that it is the middle of the night in New Zealand.
“I am so sorry for waking you up,” Hammarstedt stammers.
“Don’t be sorry. I’m getting up,” Orr replies when Hammarstedt has told him the story from Cape Verde.
Half an hour later Orr calls back.
“I am 100 per cent sure it’s them.”
Hammarstedt goes into the bathroom of the hotel room and gets a plastic cup, and then he goes to the minibar and plucks out a small bottle of whiskey. As he celebrates by himself in the silence of the hotel room, he is filled with amazement over the luck of the draw. He spent half a year of his life tracking down and chasing the Thunder; now he found one of “The Bandit 6” by chance.
The next morning he flies home to Stockholm. As he is retrieving his baggage, he receives another email from the photographer in Cape Verde. There is now a third ship beside the Itziar II and the Songhua. This ship also has a strange name, but when he sees the pictures, he is sure that it is the Yongding. Again he calls Gary Orr in New Zealand, who confirms his find.
There is a yellow flag flying from the foremast of the Yongding, a signal from the captain that there are no contagious diseases on board and that the crew is waiting for the customs officers to inspect the ship so they can go ashore. For Hammarstedt it means two things: the crew is still on the ship and there is definitely no toothfish to be found in the cold storage room. He is right. When the police of Cape Verde board the two ships, they don’t find any fish.
The crew that goes ashore from the Yongding and the Songhua are a motley group of Spaniards, Indonesians and Latin Americans. Most of them travel on to the airport, but some of them get no further than the many bars found in Mindelo. There they celebrate with beer, Johnnie Walker and the local liquor grogue. When they come to a few days later, the morning-after sets in. They are broke and there will be no salary from the ship owner in Spain. The interior, provisions and electronic equipment on the Songhua and the Yongding end up on the black market in Mindelo. Some of them manage to drag themselves to the airport, others continue the party.
Peter Hammarstedt knows nothing about the drinking binge in Mindelo, but he can scarcely believe his own good fortune. When he finished Operation Icefish, two out of six pirate vessels were put out of commission – the Thunder was gone for good and the Kunlun under arrest in Thailand. Now only two remained – the Viking and the Perlon.
Sea Shepherd has already commenced the preparations for Operation Icefish 2, but when they receive the news that the Perlon has also been apprehended, they drop it.
When Sea Shepherd found the Thunder on the Banzare Bank, the Perlon was nearby. Hammarstedt’s record-breaking chase could just as well have been a search for the Perlon, but while the Thunder, Kunlun, Songhua and Yongding were being tracked down and chased throughout the Antarctic summer, the Perlon managed to stay out of sight. At the end of April its luck ran out. At the Australian Cocos Islands, the ship was boarded by armed agents dressed in black from Australia who seized ship documents, the contents of computers and papers. Then the agents alerted the authorities in Malaysia.1
Two weeks later, a mere three nautical miles south of Tanjung Bulat on the south-eastern tip of Malaysia, the Spanish fishing captain tried to transship the fish onto a barge. But a Malaysian patrol vessel sailed up alongside them while the operation was underway, and the jig was up.
For the authorities of Australia and Malaysia this was a huge victory. For the first time in the long-standing battle against the pirates in the Antarctic they could confiscate the fish. The captain of the Perlon had not applied for a transshipment permit. It was a violation of Malaysian law.
The captain and the crew had to pay 1.6 million Malaysian ringgit – 400,000 dollars – in fines to avoid prison time. 270 tons of Patagonian and Antarctic toothfish were sold at auction for 5 million ringgit – 1.25 million dollars. The 64-year-old Perlon was sold as scrap metal.
When the crew of the Perlon receive their sentences, the Songhua and the Yongding are still in Mindelo. The ships have been dry-docked, repainted and appear to be ready for a new mission, but Peter Hammarstedt calms down by telling himself that the police still have them under surveillance.
“I think they’re a long way off from leaving and doubt that an Operation Icefish 2 will be necessary,” he writes to the authors.
A week later he has changed his mind.
42
THE ESCAPE
PHUKET/DAKAR, SEPTEMBER 2015
It looks like a reckless disappearing act, but in reality it is preposterously simple. One day the Kunlun is suddenly gone. Five men board the ship, start the engine, raise the anchor and cut and run, away from port fines, arrest orders and Thai battleships. Six hundred and fifty-six tons of steel wanted by Interpol and captured in Thailand, missing without a trace.
When fishing captain José Regueiro Sevilla navigates the Kunlun away from the tropical holiday island of Phuket on the morning of 8 September, he has with him 181 tons of Patagonian toothfish that were seized by the authorities a half year ago. In the fuel tanks the Kunlun has recently received, with the approval of the port authorities, 80,000 litres of bunker fuel.
It’s almost as if the authorities in Phuket want the ship to disappear.
When the news of the escape reaches Peter Hammarstedt, he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“Sigh …,” he writes in an email to the authors.
Then he fires off a torrent of abuse on Sea Shepherd’s website – not against Thailand, but against two nations he thinks should have done a great deal more to stop the ship and seize the catch.
“When we criticized Australia and New Zealand for not arresting the Kunlun at sea, authorities in those two countries assured the international community that the most effective tool in the fight against these poachers was port state controls. If the vessel had been arrested by Australia or New Zealand, the catch would never have been returned. Instead, Australia and New Zealand’s unwillingness to arrest the Kunlun and seize its catch at sea has allowed this poaching operation to continue, and to profit from its crimes,” the Sea Shepherd captain writes.1
Then Hamma
rstedt and Captain Sid Chakravarty decide to take on the search for the Kunlun.
Since he had to leave the Kunlun in the Southern Ocean a few months before, Chakravarty has pondered a great deal over the ship. Now the Kunlun is the perfect prey for Operation Icefish 2, a daring outlaw on the run, more famous and notorious than the Thunder. The next few days Chakravarty studies recent satellite photos of the Kunlun’s possible escape routes, but he doesn’t see anything resembling the white painted fugitive.
Sea Shepherd’s flagship the Steve Irwin is prepared for another expedition to the shadowlands to search for the last two members of “The Bandit 6” – the Kunlun and the Viking.
Most of those involved in Interpol’s Operation Spillway are extremely disappointed with the authorities in Thailand. One man comprehends, someone who has worked closely with the Thai fisheries authorities, Glen Salmon with the Australian AFMA. He shrugs off the critique from Hammarstedt and Sea Shepherd.
“For some there is no other acceptable outcome than these boats getting sunk and the master going to jail for the rest of his life. Most countries don’t have laws like that. They haven’t fished in your waters, your laws are not strong and you are not going to get a seizure of the vessel or a large financial penalty, just some sort of a fine, maybe. That is not good enough for the rest of the world,” he says.
“When this vessel went out of their port, it was probably the best day of their lives. It was like an albatross hanging around their neck.”
In Thailand the authorities point accusing fingers at one another. Neither the port authorities, the customs officers nor the Navy want to take the blame. Finally the charade comes to an end with the transfer of three customs agents in Phuket.