22

GOD’S FINGERPRINT

RIBEIRA, FEBRUARY 2015

He is thirsty, tipsy and the stories are probably exaggerated.

In Ribeira, a retired fisherman is willing to speak about the illegal toothfish expeditions in which he had personally participated. He tells us about 16-hour shifts on old, rusty hulks, crew members who are washed overboard, illness and injuries that are never treated by a physician, fleeing from coast guard ships and flag changes at sea to conceal the ship’s identity. For a five-month-long expedition he was paid around 60,000 euros.

When we show him the recent Sea Shepherd photographs of the officers on the Thunder, he recognizes several of them, among them the fishing captain Juan Manuel Patiño Lampon. But he doesn’t know who his employer is.

The women of Ribeira are also silent. The spouse of one of the Thunder officers refuses to open her door; on the phone she says that she does not have permission to speak. Another confirms that her husband is on the Thunder, that there are problems on board and that it is the last time he will travel with the ship. She tells us that she doesn’t know what problems he is referring to, but that her husband calls home every Saturday.

The home of Lampon the fishing captain is a presentable villa, situated on a site secluded from the coast road and a few kilometres away from the fish market in the centre of Ribeira. According to the Spanish register of companies, up until 2010 he ran the company Ivopesca together with another ship owner from the region. The company sold fish products and owned the vessel the Banzare, which fished toothfish from Uruguay. The environmental organization Oceana accused the company’s primary owner José Nogueira García of extensive poaching of fish and for being a member of la mafia gallega. But it was not just the environmentalists who were following the activities of Lampon’s partner. In 2008 Nogueira García was arrested for smuggling more than two tons of cocaine from Uruguay to Spain. The cocaine, at a market value of EUR 70 million, was hidden in containers of frozen fish. The case proved what the police commissioners in Madrid had long suspected: the fish and shellfish industry was being used both as a distribution channel for narcotics and to launder the profits.

Nogueira Garcia was sentenced to nine years in prison and lost all his holdings. Lampon was never a part of the case.

“He’s at sea,” the fishing captain’s wife says when we call her in Ribeira.

“Is he on the Thunder?”

“I don’t know the name of the vessel. I don’t know how long he has been at sea nor when he is coming back,” she says.

Then she hangs up.

We drive once again out of Ribeira, over the silently flowing Ría de Arousa, one of the river mouths teeming with shellfish in Galicia, full of bateas, square floating piers of eucalyptus wood that have made the fish farmers Spain’s largest producers of mussels, scallops and oysters. According to the legend, the five river mouths in the Spanish province are God’s fingerprint. On the seventh day God had to rest and then he put his hand down upon Galicia. But if it is true that God blessed Galicia with abundant shellfish harvests, he must have simultaneously have forgotten the numerous and often devoutly pious deep sea fishermen in the province. They have little in the way of fishing quotas. That is why the fishermen from Galicia have for decades sought out increasingly dangerous waters in search of a livelihood. And along the way they have made many enemies.

There is a strange and invisible connecting line running between Ría de Arousa, the search for the Thunder and Norway – a line of connection that perhaps more than anything else was the beginning of the end for the Thunder and “The Bandit 6”.

In the 1990s, an armada of fishing vessels popped up in the Barents Sea bearing flags from nations such as Belize, the Dominican Republic, Togo and Cambodia. During the worst years they fished 150,000 tons illegally. The Norwegian authorities and the environmental activists declared war on the fleet. They began recording the ships’ movements, owners and harbours where the illegal fish were unloaded. For a period of time, every single fishing vessel that travelled from the Barents Sea with fish to harbours in Germany and the Netherlands was monitored and dozens of cases were tried in courts in Russia and Norway.

One of the ships, fisheries control agencies in Europe noticed, was the reefer ship the Sunny Jane, which accepted on board illegal fish from a group of blacklisted trawlers known as “The Rostock Five”. “The Rostock Five” were controlled from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and had their winter base in the north German harbour town from which they had received their nickname.

“The fish you receive are not to be landed in Norway, the oil you use is not to come from Norwegian vessels and our harbours are closed,” the Norwegian Minister of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs Helga Pedersen warned them.

After having been turned away from a number of harbours in Europe and Africa, the Sunny Jane finally set its course for Galicia. One summer day the ship laid anchor in the Ría de Arousa carrying 600 tons of frozen tuna fish, an abandoned Russian crew, empty fuel tanks and a freezer that was threatening to break down. The Sunny Jane had run out of safe harbours to turn to, the crew had not been paid in months, and now 13 men were sitting at the mouth of Ría de Arousa, clinging tightly to their catch, the only thing of value on board that could be traded in for plane tickets home to Russia.

The Sunny Jane became the symbol for a successful fight to shut fish poachers out of harbours in Europe. But the majority of the ships sailed on to new harbours and fish banks, often in West Africa, where there were fewer coast guard vessels, surveillance planes and inspectors.

After they had chased the pirate fleet out of the Barents Sea, the Norwegian fishery authorities and environmentalists had amassed an extensive card file of pirate crafts, shady ship owners and dubious flag states. They had also recognized something new. Fish poaching was controlled by organized crime and could only be countered through international cooperation. In Norway a special criminal investigation group was appointed which was named the Norwegian National Advisory Group against Organized IUU-fishing, in common vernacular called “the fish crime investigation squad”.

Norwegian bureaucrats travelled around the world spreading their message of how fisheries crime was just as serious, cynical and cunning as human trafficking, narcotics and arms smuggling. The backers forged ships’ documents and catch protocols, laundered money, bribed port authorities and hired crews on slave contracts.

It was this recognition that induced the Norwegian authorities to finance Interpol’s intelligence operation targeting illegal fishing.

The Norwegian environmentalist Gunnar Album was probably the person who worked the most systematically. For many years he had been charting the activities of fishing vessels, shipping companies, flag states, call signals, owners, tonnage and port calls all over the world. Every single suspicious fishing vessel was given its own profile in his card file, a unique database Album shared with the authorities of many countries and which would turn out to be a goldmine in the search for the pirates. Two of the ships in Album’s file stood out as being the most active: the Thunder and the Viking. The first two fishing vessels in history to be wanted by Interpol.

In an ironic twist of fate, the evidence against the Thunder’s officers and backers led to the small town in Galicia where the Sunny Jane ended its days.

Before it was sold for parts, the unhappy ship with the jolly name lay for three years in the harbour in Ribeira.