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INTRODUCTION
The oceans make the modern economy possible, providing the most convenient and affordable means to move the things we buy, sell, build, burn, eat, wear, and throw away. On any given day, sneakers stitched together in Cambodian sweatshops are packed into forty-foot containers, then winched by dockside cranes into ships bound for Europe, where they will line the shelves of big-box stores. Oil sucked from a 150-million-year-old deposit beneath the Saudi desert travels the aquatic highway of the Suez Canal, ultimately filling the tanks of Ford sedans in New Jersey. Iron ore gouged from the red earth of Western Australia is loaded into cavernous bulk carriers and shipped to China, where it’s forged into the steel that frames Shanghai skyscrapers.
Without seaborne trade, there would be no smartphones, and no glass of red wine with dinner. Without tankers to distribute it cheaply and efficiently, there would be no economic way to extract much of the natural gas that heats our homes, nor the fuel that allows us to fly off on vacations and business trips. The evolution of the shipping business to enable this commerce is one of the most remarkable achievements of capitalism, a symphony of technical and financial innovations that have drastically reduced the cost, and increased the reliability, of long-distance trade.
Yet the industry’s success has also, curiously, led it to become largely invisible. The world’s greatest cities—London, New York, Tokyo—were once dominated by their ports, their streets crowded with the sailors and dockworkers who made them run. But as ever-larger vessels required ever-larger quays, and robotic cranes replaced longshoremen’s brawn, the ports moved away, to obscure locales like Felixstowe and Port Elizabeth. Eventually the sailors also receded from view—some made obsolete by automation, the rest pushed out by cheaper, less demanding workers from developing countries. Even more than power lines or sewer pipes, ships slipped into the background of modern life, not so much taken for granted as barely noticed at all. As consumers, we’ve never before had access to such a bounty of goods, and we’ve never had to think so little about how they come into our possession.
The story told here centers on just one vessel, a rusting hulk of an oil tanker called the Brillante Virtuoso. It is the product of more than four years of reporting, drawing on tens of thousands of pages of documents as well as interviews with more than 75 people involved in the events concerned. No scenes or dialogue have been invented or embellished for dramatic purposes; all are based on the recollections or contemporaneous notes of direct participants, or drawn from emails, audio recordings, memos, and legal filings. Where the accuracy of an account is substantively disputed, the objections are described in the text or notes.
On its own, the Brillante was nothing special, just another useful cog in the machine of maritime trade. Yet for a decade, this unremarkable vessel has been fought over, picked apart in court, and investigated by police, military forces, private detectives, and experts who make their living boarding ships to look for nearly invisible clues. And it still hasn’t given up all its secrets. Mention its name in one of the world’s maritime hubs, and as often as not you’ll get a certain kind of reaction—an arched eyebrow, perhaps, or a glance over a shoulder to see who might be listening. More than once during our research, we were warned of risks to our safety if we continued to investigate, and many of the sources we consulted asked not to be identified, fearing for their own well-being. Their anxiety was understandable. For years, the Brillante has been leaving a churn of ruined lives in its wake. At least one person involved has been murdered. Others have been threatened, kidnapped, or forced to flee their homes in terror.
This book is about the hidden system that powers international commerce, and, more particularly, about what can happen on its chaotic fringes. The shipping industry has the unique attribute of being utterly integrated with the world economy while existing apart from it, benefiting from its infrastructure while ignoring many of its rules. It’s sometimes said that the seas are lawless, and that’s true: far from shore, on a decrepit trawler or a juddering ore-carrier, there are certainly no police, and often no consequences. But the most audacious crimes can occur where the maritime world intersects with the more orderly terrestrial one—enabled by the complexities of 21st-century finance and, perhaps most of all, the collective indifference of a global populace that wants what it wants, wants it now, and doesn’t want to know the human cost.
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