Poachers Ply a Sea of Secrets

Russian sailors call it a "spider"--a cyclone on a weather map fax. Before Pyotr Yakovlev went to sea one frigid afternoon five months ago, a fellow captain handed him a spider, and a friend urged him not to go.

Yakovlev had a bad feeling about the trip, but he was under intense company pressure to sail. For the first time since his wife had known him, she pleaded with him not to go. He bade her farewell the way Russian sailors do: "Wait for me."

Sebastian Junger's book "The Perfect Storm," with its seaworthy boats and well-equipped daredevil rescue service, depicts vividly what it is to die as an American fisherman at sea.

But to write a Russian version, you'd have to take out the rescue service. You'd describe boats blistering with rust, plagued with engine trouble and lacking batteries for the emergency radio, and you'd recount the hair-curling shipwrecks nearly every sailor here has experienced.

You'd set it in a ruined town whose name translates as "Crab Factory," in an illegal industry riddled with crime and corruption--the kind of place where a captain's widow gets death threats and people speak in riddles, afraid to tell the truth about the high-stakes poaching business.

"The Russian boats look completely wild," said seaman Vladimir Smely, 41, the friend who had urged Yakovlev not to make what became his fatal journey. "They're old workhorses. You go into a port in Japan and you see this rusty piece of metal junk floating there, and it's all covered in seaweed, and there's this old sea wolf, the Russian captain. And his boat's docked next to these shiny white Japanese schooners, gleaming and clean, which glide across the water like sea gulls."

Smely's eyebrows shot skyward with amusement at his own description, revealing the tattoos on each eyelid.

Take a look at an atlas and it's hard to believe that the Kuril Islands, huddled like hatchlings under the wing of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, are part of Russia. Seized by the Soviets after World War II, they're still disputed territory.

The fishermen living on the edge of Moscow's empire do nearly all their business in Japan, racing their boats laden with contraband illegally into Japanese ports such as Nemuro and Kushiro, briskly selling their catch for yen, picking up supplies, making repairs and drinking sake and Japanese beer in port bars. They bring back Japanese TVs, videos and stereos and cheap memorabilia to hang on the walls at home.

In an industry based on criminal poaching of crab, sea urchin and other seafood--and illegal deliveries to Japan--the disappearance of Pyotr Yakovlev and five other men raised uncomfortable questions for corrupt authorities involved in the business. There was no proper search for the sunken vessel, no thorough investigation, no memorial to the men who died.

"As soon as that boat touched the bottom of the sea and the surface of the sea went flat, it was as if everyone just forgot about it," Smely said. "This case had to be allowed to sink into oblivion, and it sank into oblivion."

Yakovlev's widow, Svetlana, her words spilling in angry torrents with her tears, said: "Everything is corrupt here. When my husband disappeared, someone called me at home and told me if I talked too much they'd kill me and my children."

She's filled with rage toward the men from Pallada Iturup--the company that owned her husband's small schooner--who came to the family home on the morning of Jan. 9, pressuring her husband to sail to Japan for gasket repairs.

Later that day, as Smely urged Yakovlev not to go, Valery Sadovnikov, from Pallada Iturup, was on board urging the captain to hurry up and get to sea to beat the bad weather.

Vladimir Manakov, the owner of the company, denies that the firm ordered Yakovlev to sail, claiming that the captain went to sea without permission.

"Everyone is scared; everyone is silent because they're all poaching," Svetlana Yakovlev said. "The fishing industry here is rotten to the core. There are lies everywhere."

Although few others openly put their names to it, it's an incantation heard over and over from sailors and boat owners here in the Kurils, known in Japan as the Northern Territories.

In Krabozavodskoye, on the island of Shikotan near Japan, the mist hangs heavily over the hills like a shroud of secrecy. The air is filled with the mewling of gulls, and ravens swoop low and swift overhead, like heralds of evil, sometimes pecking people's heads.

Stepping onto the Kuril Islands, one's first impression is one of collapse and despair. Rusting ship hulks decorate the shore. Dilapidated houses and the rubble of buildings toppled by a 1994 earthquake sit grumpily on the hills.