Modern-Day Buccaneers Scourge the High Seas With Looting, Murder

John Dalby chases pirates for a living.

Real ones. The kind who commandeer ships and steal cargo and dump crews overboard.

Dalby and his team track them down with the same swashbuckling style and tried-and-true tactics that pirates themselves have used for centuries: with weapons, speed and cunning.

“We once shanghaied a ship in Shanghai,” Dalby boasts, merrily describing how his band of heavies, ex-military types, “exercised our charm and our left boot” to retake a Greek bulk carrier off the coast of Shanghai and deliver it to its owners.

Business is good, says the 51-year-old ex-sea captain, hunched over his computer on the top floor of his elegant Georgian home. The screen shows a map of the world, dotted with tiny red ships--vessels on which Dalby’s company, Marine Risk Management S.A., has secretly installed satellite-tracking devices. “Magic boxes,” Dalby calls them. They alert owners when a ship is off course. And if a ship is off course, it may well have been hijacked by pirates.

Gone are cutlasses, parrots and bottles of rum. Modern-day buccaneers wear ski masks, not eye patches. They carry rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, long knives and machetes. They commandeer luxury yachts off the coast of Greece, storm oil tankers off Singapore, creep up the hulls of cargo ships off Africa.

Like pirates of yore, they can be ruthless. In 1998, pirates killed 23 crew members of a bulk carrier in the South China Sea, weighting their bodies before throwing them overboard. In 1996, bandits murdered a British tourist on his yacht off the island of Corfu. Earlier this year, Somali gunmen hijacked a German yacht en route from New Zealand to a tourist island in the Indian Ocean, taking four hostages and demanding $50,000 in ransom.

There have even been reports of modern-day pirates forcing victims to walk the plank.

“There is nothing romantic about the modern pirate. The modern pirate is a violent seaman gone bad,” says Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau in London, a nonprofit division of the International Chamber of Commerce. The IMB compiles annual reports on piracy around the world.

The bureau estimates that at least $1 billion is lost to piracy every year. Although it has no statistics on injuries or lives lost, the reports make clear that murder and mayhem are rampant on the high seas, affecting ships and sailors from every seafaring nation.

Some recent examples:

* April 1999: Pirates with long knives boarded an Irish chemical tanker off Lepar Island in Indonesia, taking two crew members hostage and stealing cash from the master’s safe.

* May 1999. Gunmen boarded a ferry packed with tourists off Mexico’s Caribbean coast. They robbed passengers, threw two security guards overboard and destroyed the ferry’s communication system before escaping in a speedboat.

* June 1999: Armed pirates in speedboats hijacked a Thai oil tanker off the east coast of Malaysia and set 16 crew members adrift.

Piracy flourishes where it always has: in the Caribbean where Henry Morgan and Blackbeard once ruled the waves, off North Africa where corsairs once plundered the Barbary Coast, in the Far East where the pirate junks of the famous Chieftain Ching Yih were the scourge of the South China Sea, in the Malacca Strait where some 2,000 ships a day pass from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.

“It’s not like the movies,” says Andries Kingma, former seaman with the Dutch merchant marine who now works as a computer consultant based in West Chester, Pa. Several years ago his ship was jumped by a gang of machete-wielding pirates off the coast of Sierra Leone. He says his life was saved by gunfire from a friendly Russian whaling ship.

“Suddenly bullets were flying and the pirates were screaming and jumping overboard,” Kingma said. “I was scared out of my wits.”

Even if the incident had been reported, there was little local police could do. The Russians took off, and so did the pirates. Kingma and his crew couldn’t afford to delay a few days while an investigation got underway.

In the first nine months of this year, the IMB recorded 180 cases of piracy, ranging from petty theft of cash and parts to hijacked oil tankers. In 1998, it reported 202 cases. But, officials say, most high seas crimes never get reported.

Piracy has become so serious that, in 1992, the IMB set up a Regional Piracy Center in Kuala Lumpur. Financed by the shipping and insurance industries, it offers a satellite-tracking device for ships, a piracy “hotline” for captains and daily reports of suspicious vessels. It also assists local law enforcement with investigations.

But staff and resources are limited. And there’s not much anyone can do when armed bandits are shimmying up an anchor chain in the dead of a tropical night.

“Riffraff,” says Capt. J.B. Collings of the thugs who did exactly that on his barge in a river in Ecuador several years ago. The barge, loaded with grain, was under the protection of armed guards. The pirates knocked one crew member unconscious before the guards chased them away.

Collings, of Sarasota, Fla., scoffs at the term “pirate,” saying it glamorizes hardened criminals who all too often escape justice. Crews on today’s ships are so small, Collings said, that it is easy for outlaws, whose weapons and speedboats are getting more sophisticated, to take control.

Still, he acknowledged a certain sympathy for the grain robbers in Ecuador. They were probably just trying to feed their families.

Vessels Hijacked to Order

Petty acts of piracy for survival are not what concern the shipping industry. Far more serious are hijackings by crime syndicates with intimate knowledge of shipping companies and routes. They target cargoes such as sugar, textiles and steel. They steal the ship and store the loot, organize buyers, forge papers. Often, say shipping officials, they operate with the complicity of local authorities.

“The syndicates exchange intelligence among themselves and avoid getting in each other’s way,” says a 1997 IMB report. “They are capable of resorting to any means, including violence, to satisfy their greed.”

According to the IMB, a ship can be hijacked to order for $300,000 in the Philippines and delivered in three days.

The latest in this high-stakes game of high-seas crimes is a phenomenon known as phantom ships. Hijacked by pirates, a ship is repainted, the crew dumped or killed, the cargo transferred or sold. The ship sails into a new port with a false name and false papers. To the legitimate seafaring world, it is a phantom.

Truth Obscured in Blizzard of Documents

The Anna Sierra is a good example. The Cyprus-registered general cargo ship left Bangkok for Manila on Sept. 12, 1995, carrying $5 million worth of sugar. Steaming through the Gulf of Thailand, it was hijacked by 30 masked men, who sped alongside in powerboats, clambered aboard and set the ship’s 23 crewmen adrift on rafts. Rescued by fishermen, the crew alerted the piracy center, which immediately sent word to ports and offered a reward. Days later, the ship was located in the Chinese port of Beihai. It had been renamed “Artic Sea” (misspelled by the pirates). But its original name was still faintly visible, revealing its true identity.

Pressed by the IMB, Chinese officials boarded the ship and placed the crew under guard. Then began a nine-month war of words and paper to ascertain ownership.

“Every time we proved that the documents for the Artic Sea were false, that there was no ship registered under that name, the pirates would produce more false documents,” said John Martin, who ran the IMB’s piracy center at the time. “It became impossible for the Chinese authorities to know who to believe.”

After endless wrangling, the authorities gave up. The pirates were sent home to Indonesia. The ship was abandoned by its owner and, to this day, sits rusting in a Chinese port.

The losers: the companies that insured the ship and its cargo.

For the IMB, the most frustrating part was that some of the same pirates were back in action a year later, operating another phantom ship, a Japanese general cargo vessel named the Tenyu.

“The pirates are doing this for a living,” Mukundun said. “Unless they are punished, they will keep doing it again and again.”

But punishing pirates is as difficult as catching them.

Under international law it is the duty of the coastal state to prosecute the pirates, or extradite them to the flag state under whose protection the ship operates. But many ship owners cut costs by registering their vessels under flags of convenience, like Panama or Honduras--countries that don’t have the resources to respond to piracy.

Complicating matters is the fact that shipping companies, strapped for time and cash, are often reluctant to report crimes. Running a cargo ship can cost up to $10,000 a day, so owners can’t afford to let their vessels remain in port while authorities investigate.

And, as Brian Parkinson of the International Chamber of Shipping says, “It’s hard for authorities to prosecute when the scene of the crime is disappearing over the horizon at 15 miles an hour.”

Maritime organizations like the IMB and the International Maritime Organization (a branch of the United Nations) are trying to change this, pressing governments and ship owners to work together to combat high-seas crime. They’ve had some success.

Several years ago, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore began coordinating police patrols around the Malacca Strait to deter pirates from racing from one state’s waters to another’s. Greece has bolstered coast guard patrols near the island of Corfu to fight Albanian pirates preying on yachts. Indonesia recently sentenced the head of a pirate gang to six years in prison. And earlier this year, the Chinese arrested members of the gang suspected of killing the crew of the Cheung Son in 1998 and throwing their bodies overboard. The pirates have been charged with murder rather than released, as has happened in similar cases.

However, said Roger Kohn of the IMO, “For many governments, there is still a sense it all died out with Long John Silver.”

He cites the case of the Singapore freighter Hye Mieko. In June 1995 it was hijacked off Cambodia by a ship resembling a Chinese customs launch and forced to sail nearly 1,000 miles through international waters to Shanwei, in south China. Although the ship’s plight was broadcast worldwide, not a single vessel came to its rescue. On arrival in China, the ship was impounded. The owner, who had followed the ship’s path from a small plane, was charged with intending to smuggle cigarettes.

Had a similar hijacking occurred in the air, say officials, governments would have swiftly disarmed the hijackers and punished them.

Pirates know this, says John Martin, the former director of the piracy center. And that is why they are getting bolder, and “more and more shipping companies and insurers are turning to people like John Dalby.”

Martin, a British native, spent seven years as a police officer in Hong Kong before joining the IMB. He now works for Marine Risk Management as a kind of advance intelligence scout, using contacts from his time in Malaysia to sniff out high-seas skulduggery.

“The IMB can locate a ship,” he says. “But we have the resources to recover it.”

Dalby and his team make dramatic claims. The company Web site has included pictures straight out of a James Bond movie: heavily armed men in gas masks and bulletproof vests, ready at a moment’s notice to jet to far corners of the world.

Their advertised cost: approximately $1 million to reclaim a ship and cargo worth up to $15 million. A Dutch company offers a similar service.

Mariners Demanding More Action

But who pays fortunes for a dangerous deal that might turn bad and end up costing more than simply writing off a ship?

Dalby, one of the principals of MRM, won’t name the company’s clients, citing confidentiality. But privately, spokesmen for some of the major shipping companies and insurers acknowledge a growing readiness to use his service.

“Sometimes you have to go to extreme measures to protect your assets,” said a spokesman for one reputable London-based underwriting company, which has suffered its share of pilfered cargo and at least one phantom ship.

Dalby tells of a case in 1997 in which a British bank agent was taken hostage on a ship after trying to deliver repossession papers. As the ship headed for North Africa, Dalby’s men tracked its path, followed it and eventually convinced local law enforcement authorities to intervene, and rescued their man.

In 1998, Dalby says, his team flew to the South China Sea to retrieve a shipload of hijacked sugar. “We pirated the ship back from the pirates,” Dalby said, although he refused to elaborate.

For all the bravado, team commander Rhidian Bridge says that sneaking little black boxes onto ships and tackling pirates is a lot less dramatic than it seems. Bridge, a tall, 36-year-old British chap whose loosely laced army boots hint at his past (11 years with the Royal Marines), describes himself as a “risk management” specialist--not a hired gun. Most anti-hijack work, he said, is figuring out where a ship is headed and where it is likely to refuel, not leaping aboard with guns blazing.

“Nothing stands out more than a black balaclava [facemask] and a gun,” Bridge said. “Far better to be sitting on the beach with the wife and kids watching the boat come in.”

The IMB acknowledges Dalby’s appeal. But, says IMB director Mukundan, “We don’t approve of his methods.” He offers more traditional anti-piracy advice such as posting extra guards at night and using fire hoses to repel attackers.

But few expect such measures to deter a modern-day Blackbeard brandishing an AK-47.

And mariners are demanding more action.

“To seamen who have been victims of these attacks, pirates are not fictional characters,” says Douglas Stevenson, director for seafarer rights at the Seamen’s Church Institute of New York and New Jersey. “They are vicious outlaws who have forcibly invaded quarters, stolen property, killed and injured shipmates.”

They don’t have names like Blackbeard or Captain Kidd. They’re more likely to carry cell phones than cutlasses. But modern-day pirates are just as fearsome, terrorizing the seas their predecessors once reigned.

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Pirate Plunder

The International Maritime Bureau in London defines piracy as “the act of boarding any vessel with the intent to commit theft or other crime and with the capability to use force in the furtherance of the act.” Recent cases include:

* Jan. 9, 1998: An oil tanker owned by Shell International Trading was boarded by four armed pirates in Santos, Brazil. They shot two British crew members and threatened to blow up the ship.

* Jan. 24, 1998: Pirates boarded a freighter docked in the Miami River at night. They pistol-whipped the crew and then jumped overboard to avoid capture by police.

* March 3, 1998: An Australian yacht was sailing toward the island of Manus, in Papua New Guinea, when it was hailed by local women selling vegetables from a dugout canoe. As the yacht pulled alongside, nine men armed with long knives and axes leaped from the canoe, overpowered the yacht’s crew, stabbed the captain and stole goods worth thousands of dollars.

* April 16, 1998: Twelve armed pirates hijacked a Malaysian tanker carrying a cargo of oil and kerosene from Singapore to Vietnam. They forced the crew to sail to Hainan Island in China, where they attempted to sell the cargo before being intercepted by police.

* March 17, 1999: Twenty pirates with facemasks and machine guns boarded a Panamanian cargo ship in Thailand. The crew was set adrift in inflatable rafts. They were picked up by fishermen. The ship turned up in southern China under another name.

* March 28, 1999: Pirates armed with knives, machetes and machine guns boarded a Panamanian bulk carrier anchored in Sapele, Nigeria. They ordered the crew to the bridge, where they began firing their guns and smashing up equipment. Several crew members were injured.

* April 9, 1999: Pirates sped alongside a Lithuanian refrigerator ship in Zaire, firing at it with machine guns. The pirates boarded and stole cash and valuables.

* May 4, 1999: Gunmen boarded a Finnish yacht off the northeast coast of Somalia, took the crew hostage and demanded ransom.

* June 24, 1999: Somali gunmen attacked and hijacked a German yacht en route from New Zealand to a tourist island in the Indian Ocean. They held crew members hostage and demand $50,000 in ransom.

* July 20, 1999: Twenty armed pirates boarded a Bahamas chemical tanker with a crew of 17 Russians off Lagos near the Pennington Oil Field. They beat the crew, took hostages and removed equipment from the ship.

* Sept. 11, 1999: Armed pirates boarded a British yacht as it was sailing around the world. One of five crew members was shot and buried at sea the next day.