53

THE FINAL ACT

When the Thunder’s second engineer Luis Alfonso Morales Mardones came wandering into his home town of Valparaiso in Chile, he believed that the worst was over. The story of the wrecked pirate ship had sparked the interest of both the local media and the engineer’s vindictive ex-wife. Now he would have to pay off an old debt.

Mardones lived in a modest house on the ridge of a steep ravine in Cerro Cordillera, one of the hills surrounding the seaport on the Pacific shore. When we knocked on the door one spring day in 2016, the neighbours told us they hadn’t seen him in months. The only trace of Mardones was an article in a local paper. “The Story of a Pirate” was a character assassination carried out by his former wife. According to his ex-wife, Mardones had served 18 years in the Navy, but was kicked out when it became known that he’d initiated a relationship with a transsexual. After that dishonourable discharge, he signed up on a fishing vessel, subsequently became a pirate and boasted of the huge sums of money he earned on the Thunder. She was obliged to provide for herself and her children by working as a street clown, she explains.

Now her ex-husband was going to pay. After the article, Mardones disappeared from Valparaiso.

In September 2016 the Thunder’s Captain Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo came home to his fashionable apartment in the seaside resort of Viña del Mar outside Valparaiso. Cataldo and the two Spanish officers never had to serve their sentences in the São Tomé prison. Although they lost the appeal, they were allowed to leave the island without paying the fine of EUR 15 million. Their local ship agent Wilson Morais tells of how he was left to foot a substantial bill for rent and services he had carried out for the pirates. The shipping company suddenly stopped responding to his emails. The young public prosecutor Kelve Nobre de Carvalho had ambitions of following the money trail left by the Thunder, but the web of tax havens and dodgy flag states involved in the Thunder saga proved too complicated to penetrate. Instead, he sent a letter to authorities in Madrid requesting assistance in collecting the EUR 15 million fine from the ship owner. Asked by the authors who he identified as the ship owner, he named Florindo González.

The investigation against Florindo Gonzalez Corral is still ongoing.

“He is in the oven. Cooking slowly,” one of the investigators says.

Most of the crew of “The Bandit 6” ships were young and underpaid men from Java who were presumably puzzled by the fact that their officers so frequently wore ski masks. In March 2016, we are on the way to the province of Tegal to hear their stories from the Thunder’s last journey. While we are waiting in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, we are ambushed: A fight has broken out over the stories of those who lived in the very bottom of the Thunder. A research assistant at a university in New Zealand, Elyana Thenu, warns the crew of the Thunder against meeting us. And she does so by spreading a dose of lies that frightens the crew into silence.

“We have found out that one of them is a journalist, but the other has ties with the Norwegian government. You should know that Mr Glenn has discovered this through his friends outside of New Zealand. The Norwegian government is working closely with Interpol, who wants to crack down on illegal fishing,” she writes in a Facebook message to the crew.

To prevent the meeting, she threatens them.

“You will all be punished in accordance with international maritime law. I would therefore ask everyone who is in contact with these men from Norway not to speak with them,” she writes on Facebook.

“Please cancel the appointment,” Thenu virtually orders.

“Mr Glenn”, the man who was referred to in the email, is Dr Glenn Simmons, a scientist and specialist in human trafficking at the University of Auckland. He was the one who claimed that the Indonesian crew was very likely held on board the Thunder against their will, a story Sea Shepherd spread all over the world to draw attention to the chase. The Interpol agents found no evidence supporting this claim when they interviewed the crew in São Tomé. A few months after the 30 Indonesians returned to Indonesia, Simmons and Thenu interviewed several of them. The interviews are part of a research project and the crew clearly made some admissions.

“You stated that you knew it was an illegal ship and that nonetheless you chose to work there to earn money. That’s not legal,” Thenu writes in the message where she warns them against us.

Now everything will get better, she promises.

“We [Mr Glenn and I] want to help you find a better life.”

It is a perfect lie for frightening the Indonesian crew into silence. Several of them have now been hired by fishing vessels off the coast of West Africa.

Back home in Chimbote, Peru the Kunlun’s Captain Alberto Zavaleta Salas received several emails from the Vidal system in which he is urged to delete all correspondence with the shipping company. And he is asked to keep his mouth shut if anyone should call. After our meeting in Lima, Zavaleta Salas decided to collaborate with the Spanish police. Until he finds work on a ship, he subsists on odd jobs as a painter. A number of the other captains of “The Bandit 6” vessels explain that they are struggling to find work in the aftermath of all the media attention surrounding the pirate vessels.

In September 2016 in Indonesia, Captain Juan Domingo Nelson Venegas González and the chief engineer of the Viking are charged a fine of 2 billion Indonesian rupiahs. They are unable to pay it and must serve a four month jail sentence.

After the wreck of the Thunder Captain Warredi Enisuoh of the Nigerian coastal administration, NIMASA, went on holiday in Norway. At the turn of the year 2015–2016, he and a number of chief executives were implicated and later charged in a corruption case at NIMASA. Tens of millions of dollars are to have vanished from the coastal administration’s office. Warredi Enisuoh has pleaded not guilty in this case on which at the moment of this writing there has not yet been a final ruling.

In Ribeira Antonio “Tucho” Vidal Suárez is seated as usual at his favourite bar, the “Doble SS”, playing cards. In the premises there is as always an oppressive silence and suspicion when strangers enter. For years the Vidal shipping company has been able to loot the Antarctic without any intervention on the part of the authorities. They have been protected by regional policy, an antiquated body of laws and political horse trading in Brussels, Madrid and the capital of the province Santiago de Compostela to save the Galician fisheries industry. Now the game is presumably up for “Tucho”. The shipping company has been fined EUR 17.8 million for illegal fishing. When the authors meet “Tucho” in Ribeira in October 2016, a criminal case is pending. There the Guardia Civil has delivered its first blow. The court of justice has ruled that the Spanish authorities have so-called jurisdiction in the case. That means that the shipping company’s owners and employees can be penalized in Spain, even though the criminal acts they are charged with having committed have taken place in international waters. The Vidal family has appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court.

“I have nothing to say,” “Tucho” says from his seat on the outdoor patio of the Doble SS.

A few kilometres away, in a garden, the Thunder’s fishing captain Juan Manuel Patiño Lampon is preparing a fishing line. It is a magnificent villa with chandeliers and heavy furniture, situated in seclusion on a quiet street. According to the rumours, Lampon has started working for himself as an inshore fisherman. He does not look up from the line bins; he repeats only a monotone “never, never, never” when we ask to speak with him. Several of the other officers of the Thunder from Ribeira have been hired by other vessels. “Don’t bother my head with this,” or “I’m never going to talk” are the brief messages they give over the phone.

The Bob Barker’s first mate Adam Meyerson has been made captain of the Sea Shepherd’s campaign ship, the newbuilding the Ocean Warrior. The ship, with a price tag of USD 12 million and a maximum speed of all of 30 knots, is the environmental movement’s first specially built vessel and will be used in the fight against the Japanese whaling fleet, which has begun new missions in the Antarctic.

Captain Siddharth Chakravarty of the Sam Simon is taking a break from Sea Shepherd indefinitely and has started his own project, Enforceable Oceans.

When he left Hobart in search of the Thunder, Peter Hammarstedt hoped that Operation Icefish would be a turning point for Sea Shepherd. The Swedish captain wants a closer form of collaboration with the authorities, but Sea Shepherd’s violent past makes that extremely difficult.

“It’s better to cooperate with Interpol than to be hunted by them,” he told us during one of our many conversations.

Hammarstedt’s dream project has been to lend out Sea Shepherd’s ships to poor coastal nations that don’t have the resources to patrol their own waters. A few months after the sinking of the Thunder, Hammarstedt was back in the Gulf of Guinea. There he met Mike Fay, the American explorer who is a special advisor of the president of Gabon, and who promised to help Hammarstedt during the chase. Together they planned Operation Albacore, a step forward on the road to making Sea Shepherd a kind of coast guard force. In April 2016, the Bob Barker set out on a new mission. On board there were Sea Shepherd activists, fisheries officers and heavily armed soldiers. For five months, the Bob Barker patrolled the waters of Gabon and São Tomé in search of pirate fishermen. One of the vessels seized was a tuna fishing vessel owned by a shipping company in Galicia. In the cold storage rooms the soldiers and officers found thousands of fins from illegally caught shark.

In October Hammarstedt was invited to a conference on fisheries crime in Indonesia. In attendance were the officers and police who took part in the hunt for “The Bandit 6”. Sea Shepherd had been invited in from the cold.

A few weeks later, CCAMLR decided that an area of 1.55 million square kilometres by the Ross Sea in Antarctica was to be protected for the next 35 years. It is the world’s largest protected marine region.

At Christmas in 2016 the newspaper La Voz de Galicia reported that the Vidal family had won its Supreme Court appeal so the Guardia Civil will most likely have to drop the criminal case against the family. The reason for this is that the illegal fishing has taken place in international waters and the Vidal family can therefore not be punished by the Spanish courts. The open sea is still a wet Wild West and the toothfish is, in practical terms, up for grabs.

“Tucho” Vidal will be spared having to spend the years of his retirement in prison, but the fine of EUR 17.8 million for illegal fishing was still in effect when this book went to print.

When he read the news, Peter Hammarstedt sat down at his computer.

“The decision by the Spanish Supreme Court is as disappointing as the hard work of INTERPOL and Spanish law enforcement is inspiring. The ruling unfortunately sets the precedent that Spain is a safe place for criminals to organize and launder the theft of fish worth millions.

“However, the monster that is the Galician Mafia is still severely wounded, and while it licks its wounds, it does so knowing that if they resume their toothfish poaching operations in the future, then they do so under the watchful eye of police − who now understand their modus operandi better than ever before − and a proven commitment by Sea Shepherd to shut them down on the High Seas that the Spanish Supreme Court has surrendered to poachers,” he wrote in a message published on Sea Shepherd’s website.1

Then he wrote a message to the authors of this book:

“Kjetil & Eskil, had I been convinced that governments and courts of justice solved problems, I wouldn’t be doing the kind of work that I do.”

* * *

After the Thunder and the Viking sank, the Perlon was sold for scrap metal and the Kunlun, Songhua and Yongding were detained by authorities; most who had followed the chase of the “The Bandit 6” assumed that the pirate sextet was out of the game for good.

In March 2017 a ship agency in Sao Vicente on Cabo Verde received a letter from the company Pesca Cisne in Punta Arenas, Chile, regarding a vessel that had been detained on the island since Peter Hammarstedt spotted it by accident almost two years earlier.

“As you know, we are the new owners of the ship, which will be called Pesca Cisne 1. The vessel is currently docked in Sao Vicente and we would like to engage your services as our ship agent,” the letter written in Spanish read.

When it was chased in the Southern Ocean in 2015, the same vessel was called Songhua and was owned and operated by the Vidal family in Ribeira. The company in Chile who has now, according to the letter, bought the vessel, has since the late 1980s been owned by the family of Florindo González Corral from the small and unassuming town of O Carballiño in Galicia.