Lure of Easy Money Is Murder on Law and Order on High Seas

The night hangs thick and moonless over an oily calm that mirrors an occasional lightning flash and a shoreline jagged with mangroves.

“A smuggler’s moon,” whispers Gary Narzissenfeld, a 25-year-old Customs agent, uneasily fingering a holstered weapon. “No moon. No light. These guys love the dark.”

The ocean laps against the hollow-hulled Cigarette boat, but its 800-horsepower engines are quiet. The vessel rocks silently in the straits between the Florida barrier islands and the Bahamas. Agents wait, listen, even smell for their prey.

Nose Out Illicit Cargo

Last week, Narzissenfeld and his colleagues caught a contraband runner trying to slip across the leeway passage from Bimini. They smelled wet fiber glass. Smugglers often lay their cargo--drugs, cash, weapons--beneath a blanket of wet new fiberglass on the hull. The odor is distinct and travels great distances.

“If he’d only been a bit more patient and let the glass dry, he’d never have been caught.”

Shortly after midnight, two boats race out from the dark shoreline, appearing on fluorescent radar screens as moving blips among the static echoes of nearby islands and homes on stilts. Headquarters, which monitors radar units scanning from a dozen clandestine locations along the coast, barks an order across the radio: “(Vessel) M-179. Two fast-moving targets. Proceed to England.”

“England” is Customs code for Cape Florida, a tongue of land southeast of Miami.

Twin engines race and phosphorescent bow waves stream as the vessel closes in on one of those blips--a small outboard, traveling without lights. Customs’ big searchlight bores into the night, blinding the startled boaters. “U.S. Customs,” Capt. Bill Jackson says over a loudspeaker. “Prepare to be boarded.” The target craft halts. But a search reveals no illegal cargo.

Luck seems to improve later that morning. The agents stop three Cubans--Mariel boat lift refugees--seizing their Scarab-class speedboat riddled with secret compartments and laden with extra fuel tanks. Although no drugs are found, a snub-nosed 9-millimeter machine pistol is pried from beneath the planking. The Marielistas claim the weapon is used to ward off sharks. “ Muy , muy peligro (very dangerous),” one shrugs.

The men are released; insufficient evidence. Another day, another frustration in the life of the nation’s crime fighters.

It used to be that Customs work stopped at the edge of U.S. shores. But all that has changed with the explosion in the last decade of ocean trafficking in refugees and drugs. Today, Customs’ swift fleet of boats--many confiscated from the outlaws they chase--comb the inlets, straits and coves of the nation’s ocean borders beyond the reach of Coast Guard and Navy.

The lure of easy money, as Glenn Frey’s song “Smuggler’s Blues” goes, plays a catalytic role in this upsurge in maritime crime. Of course, the business is not new. Said former Rep. John M. Murphy: “Piracy and murder on the high seas is a long tradition.”

But drugs gave the business new impetus. Drugs mean big money. Big money buys thieves willing to steal big boats. Since boats are often scuttled after each drug venture, the market demand is great and steady. Big money also means murder.

“When you steal a boat on the open seas, you often steal its human cargo--the pilot, the passengers, the crew,” a Coast Guard spokesman explained. “The first thing you want to do is get rid of witnesses. Dead men, as Captain John Silver used to say, tell no tales.”

Sometimes crews survive, of course, to tell hair-raisers. Mates aboard the Kamalii, a 75-foot motor sailboat hijacked at gunpoint from a Hawaii port, were set adrift in the shark-infested Pacific on a tiny raft without food and water. Eventually, they were spotted by a passing freighter.

Held at Knifepoint

The 37-foot cruiser Whip Ray was attacked off Andros Islands, Bahamas, by a handful of “assailing criminals.” The ship’s owner was held at knifepoint. Before his wife could be raped, he managed to grab a gun and kill his attackers. He narrowly avoided prosecution by Bahamian authorities for murder.

Sometimes, of course, the crew is in on the crime. Evidence suggests that the Liberian supertanker Salem was swindled out of its oil cargo a few years back by its Tunisian and Greek crew. The 40-foot yacht Nina would have been scuttled off the coast of Latin America had not the mutinous crew member suffered a heart attack.

But pirates, by and large, have been successful in their killing. On the other end of the scale from yacht owners, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Haitian refugees have been robbed, raped and killed in recent years.

“The pirates took all of the young men aboard one of their vessels and conducted a body search, robbing them of all their valuables,” Nguyen Tien Hoa told the U.S. Embassy in Malaysia. “Then the crews of all four pirate ships, totaling around 50 men with 15 firearms, came aboard the refugee boat to rape the women.

“Following the above events, which lasted about two hours, the pirates took all the women and children aboard one of their boats. They then removed from the refugee boat all of the engine’s fuel and oil and threw all the food and water aboard into the sea.” Hoa was the sole survivor.

Politics Is New Force

What are the dynamics of today’s ocean crime? One new force is politics. The case of Leon Klinghoffer, a passenger aboard the liner Achille Lauro who died during a Palestinian hijacking, remains fresh in memory. Insurance fraud is a major factor. Pleasure and cargo vessels are worth three to five times more than they were five years ago.

But mostly it’s smuggling, in particular, the explosive drug trade.

“Smuggling, always a problem on the oceans, has now turned deadly and so lucrative that it outstrips the sales volume of the world’s largest corporations,” criminologists G. O. W. Mueller and Freda Adler reported in a study of modern piracy. “The oceans,” they concluded, “are the new frontiers of the world’s mobsters, outlaws and pariahs.”

Unfortunately, the means to contain the industry is limited.

“We’ve multiplied our strike force in just the past year and spent millions,” said Richard Boyer, 45, an assistant special agent with Customs in Florida. “But I’m not hopeful we’re ever going to really win the war.”

Reports Horace Schmahl, a maritime investigator: “It’s pretty much hopeless, until you go to the root of the problem and legalize drugs.”

Thriving in Caribbean

Crime on the high seas, after centuries of dormancy, is thriving in places like the American Caribbean, the South Pacific archipelagoes, the coast of Africa, the Malacca Straits off Singapore, the misty isles of the Mediterranean.

Ancient havens for pirates--places like the Anegada region east of Puerto Rico, the islands between Cuba and Haiti, the coastal atolls of Venezuela and Colombia--have found refurbished life in the activities of today’s profiteers. They ignore the law. The law ignores them. Or, worse, the two work in concert.

“In a lot of places in the Caribbean,” said former Illinois State Rep. Harry Yourell, a Caribbean sailor, “the law is at the mainstream of trade.”

International insurance underwriters no longer cover many commercial ships in these regions because of the resurgent piracy. “They’ve taken too many heavy losses, both in lost cargoes and ships,” said Capt. Kenneth Hofstra, a former 7th District Coast Guard officer, now a marine fraud consultant. “They’re extremely leery.”

And no wonder. Ships disappear around the world at the rate of one a week, and the business is dangerous to investigate. Private detectives have been assassinated on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Cartagena, Colombia. Even Customs agents patrolling domestic waters are instructed to carry shotguns and machine weapons and are trained to blow holes in the engines of vessels trying to ram them, a favorite tactic these days.

Cache of Seized Vessels

The thieves can overwhelm their pursuers in numbers. Their seized boats in Florida alone constitute an imposing fleet of more than 1,000 vessels--including three-masters, schooners, tugs, freighters and Scarab-class speedboats. Customs officials now have to ship excess vessels to ports farther north.

The cache of seized weapons and cash--largely from drug dealers--fills warehouses. “We’re taking in $1 million cash --a week,” said Patrick O’Brien, Customs special agent in charge of the Southern Florida division.

But it’s only a fraction of the trade.

In the United States, the FBI lists approximately 26,000 stolen boats, many times the number of 10 years ago. In states like Texas and California, the rate has risen by as much as 25% annually.

Only 10% to 15% of all stolen marine craft are recovered; scuttling is a near-perfect method of disposal. Hearings by the House Coast Guard and Navigation subcommittee are scheduled for later this spring to consider cracking down on a problem acknowledged to be low-risk and high-profit.

“It has taken some time, but we’re beginning to realize just how significant a problem this is,” said John Ralph, a New York Coast Guard intelligence officer. “Marine crimes are growing astronomically.”

Legend in the Trade

Men like Thomas Wade, 31, explain why. Wade, known as Captain Midnight, served time in a federal prison in Texas for his misdeeds as a pirate. He was never a killer, but he was a master thief, almost a legend in the trade.

“I loved working at night,” he said. “That was my time.” Authorities believe he may have taken a yacht a month during his peak years. Wade, who today is setting up as an anti-theft consultant, acknowledged that boat stealing became a passion because it was so effortless.

“I was actually doing other things along the same line, stealing motorcycles, trucks and cars. Then I went through the registration process to buy a ski boat, to buy it legally. The paper work was so ridiculous I decided to take to boat-stealing full-time.”

Wade’s best days were Mondays. Most marinas are inactive that day after hectic weekends, and security is often lax. Wade would arrive on a motor scooter, sporting a modish Hawaiian shirt, a gold oyster-case Rolex, shorts and yachting Topsiders. “I looked like I belonged.” Often marina security guards helped him load his break-in gear.

With a screwdriver, he would pop the cabin lock off a target vessel and start the engine with a filed-down key. Once at sea he’d slap on a fake nameplate. Wade often stashed his boats near vacant vacation cottages. “Unlike cars, nobody thinks twice about a boat floating for months beside an empty beach house,” he said. Wade was finally caught when an informant turned him in.

Poor Record-Keeping

Tracing boats is far more complicated than tracing automobiles. There are hundreds of boat manufacturers, some of them no more than backyard operations, compared to just a handful of auto manufacturers who standardize their registration records. The boat manufacturers neither share records nor keep them uniform.

It was only recently that the Coast Guard mandated hull identification numbers, known as HINS, but there is no central registry for all those identification numbers. To find a missing boat, investigators must find the original manufacturer and hope records are intact.

“It can be a paper-work nightmare,” said Capt. David McGillis, Florida’s marine patrol boat theft expert. It took McGillis more than a year to track down a notorious California pirate--a man convicted of tying a boat owner to an anchor and dropping him into the Pacific--and link him to a stolen boat. McGillis finally made the connection by using the musty files of a sailboat manufacturer to locate the owner of a boat reported stolen, and matching that description to the vessel to which the suspect held title.

Getting a legitimate boat title is a cinch for an intelligent thief. To prove a point, convicted pirate Wade wrote for and received 46 boat titles from various states using his home address: Seagoville Federal Prison. He does not own a boat.

Insurance companies are perhaps the biggest losers, paying out untold tens of millions each year.

“The situation facing the (insurer) is not favorable for contesting a claim,” said Ron Stone, director of government relations of the National Marine Manufacturing Assn. “To successfully contest a claim, fraudulent activity must be proven. To collect evidence takes times. But the luxury of time is not available.”

30 Days to Make Payment

Most insurance contracts require payment of a claim within 30 days after notice of loss. That is seldom long enough to go through the tedious tracking process.

Even the best of intentions backfire. Just ask insurers of the Amy Michele, an 80-foot trawler stolen by her pilot and taken to Colombia.

The company decided to recover the craft rather than write off the vessel as a $305,000 loss. According to investigative records, insurance agents ended up paying large sums to the local harbor captain in Colombia, the police commandant and official “protectors” of the vessel while in port. A Colombian attorney demanded, and got, a $65,000 fee for routine legal services.

“We have encountered numerous opportunities to recover subject through apparent racketeers demanding between $60,000 and $120,000 in underhanded offers,” detectives wired back to appalled insurance executives.

When the ship was finally recovered, it had been stripped clean as a fish. Gone were block tackle, radios, compasses, sextants, vital navigation equipment. An investigator later found a missing compass, worth $250, in a Colombian pawnshop, but had to pay $600 to reclaim it.

An American crew was flown in for the return voyage and the ship departed as scheduled. But the insurance investigation had stirred waves in waters that were seldom roiled. The home of an agent of the investigating firm was fire-bombed, and another detective was ambushed, shot in the head, and found dumped in a ditch along a Colombian road.

It was justice, pirate-style.