by Eskil Engdal
In Mongolia the Thunder operated with three different identities. The ship was registered under the name the Wuhan No. 4 in July 2012. According to Lkhagvademberel, the registration of the Wuhan was made possible by a disloyal servant at the registry, who gave the Thunder’s owner what he needed in the way of papers, stamps and signatures without registering the ship in the official registry. What is odd about the ship’s certificates that Lkhagvademberel gives us as documentation for the Thunder’s two Mongolian identities – the Kuko and the Wuhan No. 4 – is that the most important defining feature on a ship – the so-called IMO number, which follows a ship from its christening to the scrap heap – is not included on either of them. What is even more curious is the Thunder’s third identity in Mongolia. On the Thunder’s final voyage the life rafts were marked with the name Ming No. 5, Ulaanbaator. There is no Ming No. 5 in the Mongolian registry, according to Lkhagvademberel.
The streets of Singapore are hot, clean and full of life. There are hundreds of ships in the harbour waiting to unload their containers. The shipping traffic is overwhelming and chaotic, but so non-bureaucratic that Singapore is constantly cited as one of the simplest places in the world to do business. The pirate fleet’s silent service providers are also hiding in the midst of this commercial whirlwind. Here they procure provisions, spare parts and fuel. Here they also find their ship agents.
In their explanations after the wreck of the Thunder, the officers stated that it was the Singapore company Thong Aik Marine Enterprises that represented the owner of the ship. Some also implied that the company owned the Thunder.
“No, no, no. We are not the owner of this vessel. If we were, we would not have been sitting here right now,” a harassed representative for the company shouts into the telephone.
Then he hangs up.
47
THE LAST VIKING
INDONESIA, MARCH 2016
It is the crew of a merchant vessel who discovers the Viking first. The easily recognizable, blue-painted pirate lowers anchor north of Bintan Island in Indonesia. The discovery quickly becomes an intelligence report that is sent to the Indonesian Navy. A short time later a military helicopter is airborne and soon confirmation arrives that it is the world-famous fishing vessel that is now in Indonesian waters.
The first pirate on which a wanted notice was issued is the last to be apprehended.
The worn out and disillusioned crew of the Viking have sailed straight into Indonesia’s war against illegal fishing. While other nations hand out fines and prison sentences, Indonesia brings out the big guns. By the time the Viking is forced in to port at a naval base in Bintan by a battleship, the Indonesian authorities have sunk 170 foreign fishing vessels in less than two years.
“It’s simpler for us now,” explains Rear Admiral Achmad Taufiqoerrachman, who led the operation against the Viking.1
“Before we sometimes found ten ships fishing that were functioning on a single fisheries permit, but because there was so much double-dealing on the part of the companies that owned the vessels, we never succeeded in proving which nine were fishing illegally. Now we just say: This is illegal,” he says when we meet him in Jakarta a few days after the Viking has been apprehended.
And the new shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy works, according to the rear admiral.
“The number of illegal vessels in our waters has been drastically reduced.”
Indonesia is the country in the world hardest hit by illegal fishing. The authorities estimate that there are 5,000 illegal fishing vessels lurking in the island nation’s waters at any given moment. The country loses at least 5 billion dollars annually on the looting, according to the authorities.
That is why combating the fishing pirates is one of the main tasks of Rear Admiral Taufiqoerrachman and the Indonesian Navy. It is also the reason why Indonesia has a special elite group investigating illegal fishing, a group that reports directly to the president.
For Indonesia the fight against pirate fishing is deadly serious and the Viking is actually irrelevant.
“I informed the Minister of Fisheries that we had found the Viking. ‘Oh yeah! Blow it up today,’ she said. I explained that the ship was wanted by Interpol and that we should wait until they come to Indonesia so we can carry out a joint investigation,” Taufiqoerrachman says.
The Indonesian investigators and the Interpol team from Norway who go on board the Viking a few days later find that the officers have cleaned up well. There is not a document to be found from later than 2013 and outdated and destroyed electronics equipment fills the shelves on the bridge. It is not surprising. Five months earlier, armed Australian agents boarded the ship in the Indian Ocean. The officers on the Viking have had plenty of time to dump evidence into the ocean.
There is little information on the bridge that can incriminate the owner, but the investigators make finds that tell them about life on board the Viking. They discover several well-stocked medicine cabinets containing antibiotics still within their expiration date, tools to perform simple surgery, a little perused edition of Don Quixote and dozens of flags – the most well-worn is North Korea’s red, white and blue.
They also find documentation that sheds light on the Viking’s odd relation with war-torn Libya –and with the abandoned pirate ship that Peter Hammarstedt found in Cape Verde.
When in 2013 Norway requested that Interpol issue a notice on the Viking, the ship was named the Snake and was allegedly flagged in the North African country. There the owner had procured a ship’s certificate that was incompetently translated into Arabic and stamped with the coat of arms of Libya’s former King Idris, who ruled until 1969. It was obviously a forgery.
When the Interpol team ransacks the Viking in Indonesia, they find a stamp on board containing a spelling mistake: the word “Discrict”, not “District”. A stamp with the identical spelling mistake was also found on board the abandoned pirate ship in Cape Verde. And that isn’t the only connection between the two ships. Both have a relation to a dead ruler from Libya.
On board the pirate vessel in Cape Verde the investigators found an IMO number which had previously belonged to a tuna fishing vessel owned by one of the sons of Libya’s deceased dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, a vessel that was sunk during the NATO bombing of the country.
“There was somebody who knew that the Gaddafi vessel had disappeared in the chaos in Libya. And they took advantage of that,” says an officer from the Interpol team.
Given the currently prevailing chaos in Libya, this is a puzzle that it is unlikely they will manage to solve, but in the opinion of the inspection officer, the story illustrates just how far the pirates are willing to go to dupe and confuse the authorities.
Forged documents and bizarre relations with Libya contrast strikingly with the books the investigators find in the captain’s wretched cabin. He likes poetry. And in quiet moments he has sharpened his wits working on complicated sudoku.
Two mopeds transport us through the naval base on the island and to an open grassy plain screened off by sail canvas. It is an intensely clear day; the Viking is moored by the quay a few hundred metres away and surrounded by soldiers. From a distance the ship seems to loom large, almost impressively. A 70-metre ship, the Viking is the largest of “The Bandit 6”.
Then the crew is led out of a barracks and across an open field, in a silent line. They plod along slowly, wearing the same grungy T-shirts they had on when they were arrested a few days before. Captain Juan Domingo Nelson Venegas González is first; the Chilean’s body is agile and his expression is alert. When he sits down, he greets us with a forced smile. Around us stand half a division of naval officers listening to every word that is spoken.
“I didn’t hear about Interpol until we arrived here. We have been in two or three ports without anything happening. Then you figure everything’s OK, right?” he begins.
According to the captain, the last
voyage on the Viking was a diabolical trip. The ship remained docked at a shipyard in Bangkok for a long time with a broken gearbox and when they went south in September, she was boarded and inspected by the Australian Border Force northwest of Christmas Island.
After they had been fishing for a few weeks, the ship’s generator broke down. Instead of going to their usual delivery sites in Angola, the Congo and Sri Lanka, they had to dump 20 tons of rotting fish into the ocean. Captain Venegas claims that it was cod and not toothfish. With the generator out of order the bilge pumps didn’t function either, which made the Burmese crew uneasy and nervous. At one point there were incidents of insurgency and attempted mutiny on board. Because no incomes were generated from the fishing, the ship owner stopped paying. Now six months had gone by since the Burmese crew and the officer had received their wages.
“The owner has not even given us money for food. I have to pay for that out of my own pocket,” Venegas complains.
The owner of the Viking he describes as a “guy from Singapore named Eric Tan”, but says that the ship is registered with a Nigerian company.
“The only thing I know about the owner is that he has disappeared. Nobody can find him and I don’t know why he has abandoned us. I am in a lot of hot water because of him. We have only just learned that our papers are forgeries. Everything is fake, the flag, the documents. I trusted my boss. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”
“So you’re innocent in all of this?”
“I’m not innocent. I am the captain.
“If you’d Googled the Viking, you would have quickly discovered that the ship was wanted.”
“We don’t have Internet on the ship. The owner says it’s far too expensive. Besides I have more important things to do than surf the Internet.”
At first he doesn’t answer the question about whether he has been in Antarctica. After a few seconds of silence, he looks up.
“I know there’s ice in the Antarctic, but I’ve never seen it. There are many good fishing grounds between the 42nd and 43rd parallels. Both shellfish and cod,” he says.
When we show him a picture of the Viking near the ice edge in the Antarctic, he nods, uncomprehending.
“How long have you been a seaman?”
“Don’t ask me. I can’t stand to think about it. I’ve been a farmer, worked in cold storage facilities, with fish farming and shellfish farming.”
“When did you go on board the Viking for the first time?”
“Everybody asks me that but I am under incredible pressure from all sides. I can’t even remember my children’s birthdays any longer.”
“But you know the ship well?”
“Give me any fishing vessel at all and in the course of 12 hours I will know all the ship’s details from top to bottom. The engine, the generators, ballast, the bridge. Everything. But if you give me a battleship, I won’t be able to understand anything,” he says.
“I don’t want the owner to die, but I do want him to suffer like me. I thought a suitable punishment would be to put him in a chair and pour honey over him. Beneath the chair I’ll put a bucket of ants. Then the ants will crawl up and eat their way through his ass,” he says, leans forward and looks down at the grass.
“Funny, right?”
The base commandant stands up and signals that the meeting is over.
“I was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Whether I’ll have to spend months or years in jail, I don’t know,” Captain Venegas says and is led out of the shade, across the scorching heat of the grassy plain and over to the Viking. The next day he will sail the ship for the last time. Then the old pirate vessel will meet its destiny, the bomb enthusiast the Minister of Fisheries Susi Pudjiastuti.
On 14 March 2016, the Minister of Fisheries flies journalists and ambassadors to the beautiful Pangandaran Beach in Java with her own airline company Susi Air. The Viking rests on a sandbank waiting for its executioner.
“This is Indonesia’s contribution to the global community in the endeavour to eliminate illegal fishing,” the fisheries minister says.
Then there is an explosion.
48
OPERATION YUYUS
GALICIA, MARCH 2016
Every day Antonio “Tucho” Vidal Suárez gets into his grey Land Rover and drives the short distance from the elegant villa on the hill overlooking Ribeira and down to the harbour. After having visited the fish market he continues to his favourite bar, the Doble SS, an unpretentious establishment with five tables and a long bar. Together with a couple of long-since-retired old salts, he kills a few hours playing cards. Then he ends the day with a coffee while he makes a few business calls at one of the tables outside. “Tucho” has retired, but every time the family convenes to make an important decision, it is still the patriarch who has the last word, the “Mafia fishermen’s godfather”, as some people call him.
“Tucho” doesn’t see what is hiding in the shadows. By the bar a plainclothes policeman is covertly taking photographs of him. The telephone has been tapped, and many of his routine movements are followed by eyes he cannot see. Hidden video cameras have been installed by the entrance to the shipping office. When on the rare occasion he manoeuvres the expensive Bentley out of the underground garage, an anonymous vehicle follows behind him. When he fills the car up with petrol, there is a stranger nearby.
After “The Bandit 6” was chased and boarded in the Southern Ocean, the Spanish minister of agriculture, food and the environment summoned the director of the environmental crime division of the national police force of the Guardia Civil for a meeting.1 They were having problems with a criminal family in the north, she explained.
When the Guardia Civil investigator Miguel and three of his colleagues are put on the case, they know virtually nothing at all about illegal fishing and the Galician fishing mafia’s operations in the Antarctic. But after having consulted with environmentalists, fisheries experts and Interpol, a clear image begins to emerge of who is involved in the looting of the Antarctic. After a few months, the Guardia Civil agents travel to Galicia to take a closer look at the suspects: The Vidal family, Florindo González and Manuel Martínez Martínez. They check the offices and residences of everyone involved and then make a decision.
The first target of Operation Yuyus is the Vidal family in Ribeira.2 They have the most ships and hands down the worst reputation of all. The havoc wreaked by the Vidal family was so blatant and the international pressure on Spain to investigate them so great that it was an embarrassment for the Spanish authorities.
For the undercover police from Madrid, the Vidal family seems more like ordinary white collar criminals than a mafia organization. But who knows, one of the undercover agents thinks, perhaps it will blow up tomorrow?
From endless hours spent on stakeouts they have established that the brothers Manuel Antonio “Toño” and Angel “Naño” Vidal Pego seldom go out for lunch, but instead have homemade sandwiches at the office and that both have an affection for the car make Porsche. “Toño” has a large Cayenne, while “Naño” is most satisfied in the sports model 911. But that is hardly a crime.
For months they have tapped the telephones of several of the shipping company’s employees, but the results have been disappointing. None of the conversations have been about the pirate vessels.
However, the investigators have found informants with detailed knowledge of the Vidal family’s business and register of sins in the Antarctic, and who know where conclusive evidence against the family is to be found. But Miguel wants to hold off on securing this. First, they will launch a full-scale raid on the offices and residences in Galicia.
The investigation remains under wraps until the Guardia Civil starts checking the bank accounts of the Vidal family’s companies in several Spanish banks. A bank employee warns the Vidal family’s financial director that the police are sniffing at their finances. When Guardia
Civil picks up on the warning from a phone tap, they decide to move in immediately.
Early in the morning of 7 March 2016, 50 Spanish police officers and two Interpol agents get into their cars. They have with them two tracker dogs that can sniff out hidden cash. It is the largest offensive against the Galician fishing mafia ever. And it has been planned down to the most minor detail.
One team sets out for an office in the city of A Coruña, while two other teams drive towards Ribeira. When they have reached the Barbanza peninsula, some of the cars turn off the motorway, heading for the Vidal family’s fish oil factory near the city of Boiro. The rest of the cars continue driving another 20 kilometres along the gentle curves of the motorway leading to Ribeira. At exactly nine o’clock all the teams make their move.
By the time Miguel is inside the office in Ribeira with a search warrant in his hand, he is sure that he is expected. During the first few minutes the atmosphere is nervous; one of the staff is punching a number energetically into the telephone. The two computer specialists from Interpol receive the passwords for the computers and start mirroring the contents.
In drawers and cupboards Miguel and his colleagues find several dozen mobile phones and SIM cards. When he looks down into a box containing 30 SIM cards from Spain, Portugal and Thailand, Miguel understands why the telephone tap has not produced results. The shipping company’s people have been constantly switching telephones and communicating by Skype and Telegram, programs on which it is possible to delete messages a short time after they have been sent.3
Although the Guardia Civil will never find these messages, Miguel is satisfied with the find. The Guardia Civil wants to attempt to prove that the ship owner family Vidal and some dozen co-workers are an organized crime syndicate and it is only people with something to hide who replace the SIM card every time they communicate with one another, he thinks.