50

A DIRTY BUSINESS

HOBART, JUNE 2016

The Thunder lies shrouded in the darkness of 3,000-metre depths, colonized by micro-organisms, algae and rust-eating bacteria that are slowly consuming the hull. Interpol and Sea Shepherd call the ship’s demise and final sentencing in São Tomé a breakthrough in the battle against fisheries crime.1

“The chase of the Thunder showed that there are millions of square miles of ocean that are unregulated and that you have unscrupulous people who are chasing the money,” US Secretary of State John Kerry stated at a conference in Chile.2

Fourteen months after the sinking of the ship the owner of the Thunder has still not been punished.

Hobart. It was here the search for the Thunder began.

The rain is hammering down on Tasmania’s capital on this June evening. That is perhaps why the city seems desolate and forsaken. Its neat rows of Georgian stone houses give it a touch of an English village’s calm complacency. The old storage houses on the harbour are a reminder of the time when the city equipped whaling expeditions to the Antarctic. There are no guests at the Hadleys Hotel bar, but Roald Amundsen’s portrait stares down from the wall.

In March 1912 Amundsen came here and was given a “miserable little room under the stairway”. He felt that he was treated like a vagabond. The next day he walked over to the post office and sent a telegraph reporting the news of his conquest of the South Pole to King Haakon of Norway. Near one of the piers extending like fingertips out into the Derwent River, the Norwegian polar explorer Carsten Borchgrevink set out on his Southern Cross expedition, the first to spend the winter in the Antarctic.

Soon the former penal colony was the most important depot for Antarctica. The Secretariat of CCAMLR, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, is located in an old schoolhouse in Hobart.

“This is a dirty business and we must continue to hunt down these bastards until each and every one of them is in prison and all their ships are lying at the bottom of the sea.”

Professor Denzil Miller is called an Antarctic legend. He has led 15 scientific expeditions to the continent, and for eight years he was the Executive Secretary of CCAMLR.

“This is not about catching some fish. It is world-wide, organized crime. If we are going to stop them, we must be far more serious about following the money trail, where the money goes and what it is spent on. I have suggested that we establish ‘red cells’ with our own intelligence officers who operate completely under the radar and outside the system and who have the freedom to access tax registries and bank accounts. When it comes to crime as sophisticated as this, personal liberty does not exist. We must clean up one area at a time, chase them from place to place, stop them, harass them and investigate them. The ship owners all operate according to a simple principle: the possibility of being caught and punished is so small that it’s worth the risk. And usually you can buy your way out of the problems,” Miller says.

“There’s no difference between stealing somebody’s food and killing them. The consequence is the same, it’s just a different kind of action. With one you kill a little more slowly than the other. There is therefore no reason to respect Vidal and the other ship owners as risk-takers. They are bandits. Illegal fishing is a way of breaking down moral and social structures. At the same time, it discloses people’s unfathomable greed.”

After a toothfish poaching vessel sank off the coast of South Georgia with 17 casualties, the autopsy report showed that most of the crew were either HIV-positive or had hepatitis.

“They were the poorest of the poor. A few years later the casualties from the wreck of the Amur were dumped on land near a landfill in Mauritius. That shows what kind of people are behind these operations,” Miller says.

When the pirate skip the Amur sailed out of port in Montevideo in September 2000, it already had a death sentence. The ship was in terrible shape, the crew barely had any experience as fishermen. Off the coast of the Kerguelen Islands the ship sailed into a violent storm, two waves broke over the ship, and seconds later it was being tossed around in the breakers, listing perilously. The fishing gear blocked the evacuation routes, there were no fire extinguishers on board and the crew fought to make their way to life rafts which never opened. At first the ships in the area did not respond to the distress signals. When the disaster was a fact and a vessel came to their rescue, 14 of the Amur’s crew had drowned or frozen to death. The survivors and the deceased were taken on board an illegal, Russian-registered vessel. The corpses were put in the cold storage room together with the toothfish. In Mauritius both the dead bodies and those of the crew who were ambulatory, were dumped on land without papers or explanation. The ship owner later told the next of kin that they were not entitled to any compensation, in that there were neither insurance policies nor proper employment contracts.

In the years from 1996 to 2003, as many as ten ships are believed to have disappeared on their way to the Southern Ocean. They were floating coffins which seldom incurred large losses for the ship owners if they were taken down by the breakers in the Antarctic. Or by the authorities. Any crew members who were arrested were abandoned and forgotten by the ship owners.

After the Uruguay-flagged pirate ship the Maya V was boarded and escorted to Australia with 200 tons of toothfish in the cold storage room, the crew were let off following the payment of an insignificant fine. But the shipmaster and the fishing captain stood trial. The 71-year-old shipmaster stated that he had had two heart surgeries, had a helpless and mentally ill son at home in Uruguay and only 20,000 dollars in his retirement fund. During the time he spent in prison, the Spanish fishing captain started showing signs of clinical depression and paranoia.

Instead of paying the bail for the shipmaster and the fishing captain, the ship owners lent out the money at 7 per cent interest. Also the Chilean crew felt that they’d been left holding the bag. They had to pay fines and airline tickets out of their own pocket and at home in Chile they brought charges against the company that recruited them, the fisheries company Pesca Cisne in Punta Arenas. The company was controlled by the González family of the tiny city of O Carballiño in the Spanish province of Galicia.3

“The Spanish operators could basically be described as downright cruel.”

The environmentalist Alistar Graham pronounced this judgement almost 20 years ago. Long before Interpol became involved in the search for the fishing pirates, Graham ran his own intelligence operation to find the owners behind the illegal toothfish vessels. From Hobart he operated the organization Isofish, the foremost objective of which was to expose companies and individuals who made their fortunes on “the white gold”. It all started when Graham, with his irrepressible chuckle and indubitable talent for raising hell, picked up on a rumour claiming that there was a fleet of illegal toothfish poaching vessels in Mauritius. In exchange for a substantial amount of money, an open bar and a rural hiding place he sent an acquaintance to Mauritius to spy on and infiltrate the pirate fleet. After having exposed the pirate toothfish fleet in Mauritius he continued to follow the trail all the way to Galicia.

“The ships are just steel. Every morning there was somebody who jumped out of bed and decided what the ships should do. They were the ones we were going to find,” Graham says from his “office” in Hobart, the pub and restaurant of the New Sydney Hotel.

Graham had developed a sly technique for extracting the truth about the illegal fishermen. He knew that he was confronting large men who carried out difficult jobs in dangerous waters and who were away from home for long periods of time. Nonetheless he wanted to send them a message: I know where you are, where you live and what you are doing.

When Graham travelled to Galicia in the end of the 1990s, he took contact with the local newspapers and provided them with information about the fish poachers and his stories about them were circulated in the local community. Then he applied pressure on the stay-at-home wives, probed and asked questions about what their husbands were actually doing. At first a hellish commotion ensued, but little by little the wives and mothers started to talk. And some of the ship owners.

“One of the ship owners told me how he had learned the business from his father and that his eight-year-old son would take over the business. He was working from a modest office in Vigo. From there he could organize fishing operations all over the world. They were not concerned about whether they were fishing legally or illegally. They just went out and did it.”

“It was a hard game and no place for losers,” Graham states today.4

In the course of a few days everyone in Vigo, Galicia’s largest city and Europe’s largest fishing port, knew there was a stranger sniffing around in the city.

“One morning while I was eating breakfast at the hotel in Vigo, all of a sudden two bloody enormous guys appeared beside my table. They wanted to know what I was up to. I looked up at them and thought: I’ll never survive this. It was Florindo González and his brother,” Graham says.

It was the same Florindo González who was sued by the unhappy crew of the Maya V. And the same person the Spanish private detective “Luis” had identified as the owner of the Thunder.

The correspondence with the secret informants who spied on the pirate fleet for many years is in the files of COLTO – the coalition of legal toothfish operators. In an email from 2004 two men are listed as the two largest poachers in the Southern Ocean: Antonio Vidal Suárez and Florindo González.

“The main thing has been to get the interest and focus of Australian, US and Spanish authorities on catching ‘Mr Big’ of IUU-fishing, rather than focusing on the smaller people involved … What I want to ensure is that Vidal, and González do not get away with all their actions, which have made them millionaires over recent years.”

Twelve years after the letter was written, “Mr Big” is still at large.