Modern Wisdom - #478 - Kit Chellel - The Wild Hijacking Of A $100 Million Supertanker

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

Kit Chellel is a senior reporter at Bloomberg news, an investigative journalist and an author. The Brilliante Virtuoso was a Suezmax Supertanker. The largest class of ship that can go through the Suez Canal. It had a million barrels of oil on it and was supposed to be escorted by a security team. It was hijacked and burned by Somali pirates, nothing was stolen and the owners claimed $100 million for insurance. The British investigator is killed overseas, a Greek millionaire threatens people in court and no one can work out what's happened or how to discover who has committed the crimes. And that's just where the story starts... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get up to 47% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Protect yourself from identity theft online with Aura. Try 14 days for free at http://aura.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on the amazing 6 Minute Diary at https://bit.ly/diarywisdom (use code MW15) (USA - search Amazon and use 15MINUTES) Extra Stuff: Buy Dead In The Water - https://amzn.to/3PsfI57  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is Kit Shellel. He's a senior reporter at Bloomberg News, an investigative journalist and an author. The brillianté virtuoso was a Suez Mac Supertanker, the largest class of ship that can go through the Suez Canal. It had a million barrels of oil on it, and was supposed to be escorted by a security team. It was hijacked and burned by Somali pirates. Nothing was stolen, and the owner's claimed $100 million for insurance. The British investigator is killed overseas, a Greek millionaire threatens people in court, and no one can work out what's happened or how to discover who was committed to crimes. And that is just where the story begins. Kit has been researching this for nearly five years,

and the story is wild. It's so phenomenal. It's similar to the episode with Mark Freestone about psychopaths last week. I just enjoy some low stakes listening. You don't need to remember this for your morning routine tomorrow. You can sit back and enjoy a great investigative reporter

telling a super interesting story about wild corruption and piracy. Enjoy. But now, ladies and gentlemen, sit back and enjoy one of the wildest stories I've ever heard with Kit Shellell. I can't believe that modern-day piracy is still a thing. Yeah, I didn't really know much about it before I started down the road of doing this book. I just assumed that shipping was like everything else. The economy modernizes, the world gets bigger and more corporatized and generally safer, but that just didn't, that hasn't happened yet with shipping. It's still in some ways the same as it was back in the days when pirouettes were roaming

in the Caribbean. It's still kind of lawless around the edges. It's still dominated by like very secretive, wealthy people. And it still does its business completely outside of the general public and law enforcement. And we just don't know what goes on out there, but it turns out there's a lot of crime happening, which is kind of a subject of the book. Isn't it that 90% of the things that you see, 90% pretty much everything is arrived by ship? Yeah, that's right, Chris. The famous expression is 90%

of everything, and that runs from your iPhone, your smartphone, your computer, through to a Barbie doll you bought for your daughter, through to, you know, some fresh fruits that's come in, it's all come by boat. It still works that way, and, you know, we're still, we're actually more reliant on chips than we have ever been in human history. It's, it's so important. It's interesting, like, I don't understand how such a fundamental industry, remembering what happened with the ever given when that block of Suez Canal and all hell broke loose for a couple of weeks. I don't understand how it's still such a cowboy industry.

Is there something very particular about this industry that's causing it to have loopholes that people can take advantage of? There's a few things happening at once, really. The main one is the same story as that it's always been, which is that government and police forces and federal agencies, they only reach about 10 miles out off the shore of whatever country you're in. And once you go past that point, there is no law. Quite literally,

that's the case, you know, and so actually true. Well, I mean, technically, when you want to ship your subject to the law of the flag that you're flying at the time. But, you know, the reality is that out at sea, if a crimson gets thrown over the side of a vessel and his, you know, his fellow sailors are threatened into silence. Who's going to prosecute that crime? Which police force is going to bring the perpetrator to justice? It kind of falls in between the cracks of global law enforcement and police and law enforcement agencies have a tough enough time dealing with all the shady crap that happens on shore. They just don't have the resources on the means to stretch out into the sea. And so, you know, 150, 200 years ago, if you've murdered someone and you wanted to escape

justice, you could just board a tramp ship at your nearest port and go off to the New World or go to Africa or Asia. And, you know, it's still a bit like that. It's just really difficult for law enforcement agencies to monitor what's happening at sea. So attracts a certain kind of person. I've got a friend, Michael Maliss, who's a famous anarchist, and he always uses this example.

He says, a Frenchman murders a Canadian in Mexico who investigates it. Well, I mean, a good example of that problem is what happens when someone burns a Greek owned oil tanker that is carrying a million barrels from Ukraine to China is ensured in London and is carrying the flag of Liberia and owned by a shell company in the Marshall Islands. And it's funny when you put it that way, but that literally is the quandary when an incident like that happens. Everyone sits around going, who's job is this? That's like one of those logic puzzles that you get in the back of the telegraph.

Yeah. Julie is Joanne's mother and Katie is her sister. They have known each other for 45 years. How old is Blah Blah? How many birthdays is it until the dog dies? So all right, I talked to me about the fact. Let's get the pirates, right? So you have this ship, which is trying to get from the Ukraine to China.

It's got, what's the value of the cargo? The cargo is about $100 million. It's a million barrels of oil. Okay. That's about the time that's $100 million. Would it be way more now? Should it do it now? Should it be what you're doing now?

Talk to me about how pirates operate. Like you've got this huge ship. I had some people may have seen Captain, what was that film with Tom Hanks? Captain Phillips. Captain Phillips. It still kind of blows my mind that a little wooden boat with a couple of guys in sleeveless t-shirts

and wooden guns are able to stop a huge tanker moving at full speed. What's their ammo? Captain Phillips is actually a great starting point for the way modern piracy works. And especially in 2011, this was the peak of Somali piracy, which is the kind that everyone's read about and seen movies about. There was an attack on a ship once every couple of days back in this period. It was rampant.

And the MO, the Somali pirates, they had had a skiff which is a tiny little motorboat quite quick carrying maybe you know six or seven guys with guns and sandals and scruffy clothes and they would be directed out to a large any large vessel they could find coming through the Gulf of Aden and they would come alongside it use grappling hooks to try and board literally climb 30 or 40 feet at the side of these enormous vessels and then wave their guns around, get into the bridge and take the ship back to Somalian water where it would be held until someone paid a ransom. And the crazy thing was that, you know, these ransoms were paid. They were often

paid. Not only would they be maybe 20 sailors whose lives would be at risk if the ransom doesn't get paid. A big cargo ship might be carrying $1 billion worth of cargo on its own, 20,000 containers that could be packed with laptops or whatever else. They just simply couldn't afford to have these vessels, you know, sat off the coast of Somalia for months and months at a time. So they paid. I once spoke to a guy whose job it was to pay pirate ransoms. And he would sometimes literally take a small plane and fly over Somalia and drop suitcases of cash out the window. So this insane industry sprang up and it was incredibly lucrative for the Somalis. So in 2011, the oil tanker in our store in the Brilante Virtueoso comes into this area

and of course everyone on board is terrified because they've seen Captain Phillips, right? They've heard the stories of what happens to sailors when Somali pirates get on board. It's the middle of the night and all the Filipino sailors on board are absolutely terrified that something's going to happen. What's special about this place that they are in the water? The Gulf of Aden. The Gulf of Aden just happens to be the part of the coastline of Somalia and of the Middle East. And it's at the entry point of the Suez Canal. So if you're coming from Asia and you're transiting the Suez Canal, which you have to do otherwise, it's a like a 3000 mile journey round the whole of Africa,

you have to come through the waters of the coast of Somalia and you have to get quite close. And you know, this is a major world trade group. You know, we saw that when the sewers can now got blocked for a week, how bad it was for the whole world. There is no option but to transit sewers. So major vessels have to risk passing through this area. There's a few things that you can do to make it safer. Go very quickly, would be one. A lot of vessels would go in naval convoys, they'd have a big British or American

or European destroyer escorting them through the area, which is going to put off any pirates. Sometimes they would carry guards, armed guards, and the Brilante Virtue also decided it was going to pick up a security team off the coast of Aden, which is a Yemeni port. And so they had to just wait overnight, a few miles off the coast of Aiden for these guys to arrive by boat. That does seem a little bit like trying to fix the problem by hitting it with a big hammer.

Like the very thing that you're trying to avoid by getting the security force on board is the thing that you're inviting by sitting there in the middle of the night. This becomes important as the story progresses, but yeah, you're absolutely right. It's not the cleverest thing to do to wait in a heavily pirated area overnight drifting without power. Not only that, but the captain decided to light all the lights at the Brilante Virtua.

So it was lit up like a Christmas tree. You could literally see it from 10 miles away. You can imagine how the crew felt just sitting out there waiting. What security measures does a normal ship have? You don't have an escort with you. You're not moving quickly. Is there anything that they've got? Mostly they don't have guns or actual weapons.

It's kind of legally problematic to shoot at people from a container ship or an oil tanker, let alone the moral question. So they don't normally have guns, but in the absence of that, and you see a bit of this in Captain Phillips, they have these powerful water hoses that are actually can blast these powerful streams of water, small vessels and can capsize them. The Brilante ran barbed wire all the way around the outside of the vessel to make it harder for pirates to board. I think at one point they even had like a mannequin dressed up in sailors gear, propped up on the bridge to look like it was there was someone on watch even when there wasn't.

The pirate scarecrow. He had pirate scarecrow. It's basic and not terribly effective, it turns out. How did they get on them? So it was a strange incident. The crew of this ship are all Filipino and there's a watchman. It's about coming up to midnight and he's just finishing his shift and he sees a small vessel approaching very fast. So he goes down and hails them and he can see

from the deck of the ship that this is a small boat carrying armed men wearing masks. They're carrying what look like AK-47 rifles, they're in strange sort of camouflage outfits and they shout up that they're the security crew, that they've arrived, they're the security crew, and they've arrived and are ready to board. Now, as anyone would, looking down at these men with their masks and their AK-47, they don't look much like professional security operatives, and he's read the guy on what he's really reluctant to let them on board, but you know, he calls up to the captain in the bridge, and the captain's instructions are clear

and immediate, let them come on. So he lowers the ladder and literally invites them onto the ship, and they've been on board for no more than two or three seconds when they point their rifles at him and demand to be taken to see the captain. Well, straight away there, there's something dodgy going on. How would they know that they were waiting for a security force? How would they know that that would be a thing that they could shout up? That's the big question. How would they know that there was a ship here waiting for security crew? You would have to have very specific knowledge.

All right, so what happens next? So what happens next is this chaotic situation where you've got a seven- or eight armed men on board the ship. The Filipino crew are rounded up and locked in the television room, the captain and the chief engineer are taken away by these armed men. And from the point of view of the sailors who were locked in the TV room in the middle of the night, it's terrifying situation.

They have no idea what's happening. They hear the engine start up, which is not a good sign because they all know what happens if this ship makes it to Somalia. And then they hear gunshots. And even worse than that, they hear an explosion coming from deep within the ship and smoke starts pouring in through the grills. So, you know, they recognize that this is about the worst situation they could be in, they're sitting on top of a million barrels of explosive liquid and the ships clearly on fire. So they decide to take a risk and get out of the TV room, so they get out of the room,

the pirates have disappeared and so they sort of inch their way up to the bridge, up the steps in complete darkness because the power's gone out. And they find the captain sort of log tied on the bridge waiting to be rescued. Hang in a second. They've left. The pirates have left. The pirates just up to the left. They disappeared. They're supposed to take this back for ransom.

That's their usual MO, right? Yeah. But they've left. The captain's there. That's their usual MO, right? Yeah. But they've left. The captains there. Everybody's there. No one's been harmed. No one's been hurt. No one's been shot.

No, they just left. They there was a mysterious explosion and then they left. You can see why almost immediately people who had a financial interest in the ship were asking the question, what the hell happened here? This doesn't look like a normal. Yeah, exactly. So how do It's like a normal piracy attack. How do they get saved? Is the ship still mobile at the moment? No, it's dead in the water. It's just floating. It's

there's a really serious fire happening now. And it's so hot they can feel the heat and they can hear the sound of the steel on the ship, sort of warping and bending in the extreme heat, which is, you know, a really unawful sound to hear. But they do a couple of things. There's a security button on the bridge that they press, which alerts the local authorities and naval forces that there's a problem, and they issue a distress call, which is picked up by an American destroyer called the USS Philippine C, which is an hour or so away.

And, you know, the Filipino guys say, Philippine C, Philippine C, we're under attack. Please come and help. And within the hour, the Americans are there. They've got a helicopter and they're in a position to help out. Right. So everybody gets picked up and taken away. Yeah, they abandon ship. Everyone abandon ship. They get into the lifeboat so everybody gets picked up and taken away. Yeah, they they abandon ship, everyone abandoned ship, they get into the lifeboat and they picked up and taken aboard this USS cruiser. One of the individuals, the chief engineer, somehow is left on board and he's on the ship for about two hours on his own in very strange circumstances. He later tells

people he was just hiding from the pirates in the engine room. But at the crack of dawn he sort of appears on deck waving a flag and jumps into the water and is picked up and taken away by the Americans as well. Okay. What are the rest of the crusade? Was he not with them in the TV room? Was he some of those? No. No. You know, this is one of the strange things about what happened is he basically disappeared from sight for hours. He would later say that he was taken to the engine room to keep the engine running and he managed to escape from the pirates and hide in a toilet. And then basically sort of sculpt around for a few hours until Lephire became so serious that he had to leave and then he was rescued. Everyone's so dodgy and there's no one that isn't dodgy so far.

Okay, Lloyds of London are the people that are in charge of the sort of protection strategies for this because there's a lot of different people who own the ship who want their money before potential loss or wastage or the actual cargo that the ship's got on it, where did they get involved? Well, so Lloyd's is the market where you buy insurance for anything big. If you want to launch a space rocket or carry a million barrels of oil from Ukraine to China or build a skyscraper, whatever it is, you can't get your bank loans without getting insurance. It's just impossible, it wouldn't happen. And so if anything really big, you go through Lloyd's,

it's like 500 year old market, it's been the biggest in the world, for a long time and it remains the biggest in the world. So that's the place you get your insurance from, and that's the place that connects all the different insurers to a ship like the Brilante Virtuoso. So whenever something bad happens at sea,

whenever there's an accident or a fire or a hurricane or whatever it is, Lloyd has sort of an apparatus that kicks into action to start solving problems, start trying to rescue the vessel. It's a little bit similar to, if you're bathroom floods, you know, who do you call the first person you call as your insurer? And then he talks to your insurer and the insurer negotiates someone to come out and first of all fix the problem, and then afterwards try and get some compensation to repair the damage. It's the same in shipping. Okay, so who do Lloyd send? So initially the first person on the first people on the scene are

salvage experts. Salveage crews are like the emergency service of the ocean. They're these guys who roam around looking for shipping accidents. They show up on the scene as fast as they can. And they're there to rescue a sinking ship essentially. They'll come on board, plug leaks, put out fires, rescue the crew. And the reason they do that is not because of the great guys and they're doing it from the kindness of their hearts. It's because under the maritime rules of the Lloyds market and Oceanbound trade generally, if you manage to salvage a ship, you get anything up to 10% of the value of what it's carrying. Now, if you imagine these days, a big ship might be carrying a billion dollars worth. If you're a salvage

crew and you get one of these ships that run aground and you manage to, and you show on your first on the scene, and you rescue it, that's a huge payout. So it's a crazy, risky, dangerous but very lucrative business. And the first guys that show up is this Greek salvage crew that are based in Aden. And so they start doing some basic firefighting. The ship doesn't sink then. It doesn't sink. No, the fire initially looks like it's gone out and then there's an up surge in the inferno and the salvage crew spent a good couple of days doing firefighting efforts. So they're pouring water on board, they eventually board the vessel and try and look at the damage and they're responsible for that ship while it's in the emergency situation.

Is there ever been a case where multiple salvage crews have arrived at a ship at the same time and they're competing for it? Sounds like, is it like finders keepers? Yes, it is a bit like that. And because of the way salvage is, these are rough, sort of, where they're hard and sailors. They're tough people, they have to be, it's that kind

of game. And so it could be quite violent, you know, they can sometimes be conflict between salvage crews at the shop at the same time. You know, I've heard of guns being pointed to keep other salvage crews away. Sometimes salvage crews will sort of board a vessel that's in trouble and try and forcibly remove the chains from the other salvage crews so they can take control of it. It can get a bit nasty, but when you're talking about $50 million worth of rewards, you can imagine why they do that. Yeah, it's a serious incentive, I suppose, to play dirty. So what about the investigation? Yeah, so after you've stopped the flooding your bathroom, you need to someone to come

and assess the damage, you need an assessor. And it's the same with this gigantic ship. There's, you know, a dozen companies potentially facing a loss over this vessel. And what they need an expert to go and first of all say, you know, is this ship finished? Is it a total write-off? Can it be repaired and recovered? And what's the nature of the damage? What caused the damage? Until the person who does

that job was called a marine surveyor and it just so happened that in nearby Aden there was a very experienced British guy called Captain David Mockett who had been doing this job a long time. He was kind of famous in the port city because he was about six foot four. He was like by half the foot, the tallest guy in the area had this big booming laugh, huge personality, everyone knew him. And he was the guy that you hire if you want a job done properly off the coast of Yemen. So the insurers quickly appointed him to go and do get his boots on the deck and go and do a proper survey. One fellow for the entire boat, for the entire investigation. one fellow for the entire boat, for the entire investigation?

Well, he's there in the first instance, just to get a board, quickly to get an idea of the damage of course. I'd kind of like the crime scene photos and then perhaps after that, they can be assessed by a big team of people. Exactly. They would eventually expect to tow the ship somewhere much safer, and then there'd be dozens of people calling all over it.

But in the meantime, they need someone to take a look. And David Mocker is the guy they hire. He takes the fishing boat out. He manages to talk his way in with the Greek savage crew. And he gets aboard the vessel, looks around, and like you say, he has a camera, he's taking pictures all the time, takes hundreds of pictures of the twisted wreckage of the inside of the ship. And I think you can see early on it's completely destroyed. The ship will never be used again. It's damaged beyond repair. What's happened then?

The fire's just got rid of some important parts of infrastructure. The engine room is destroyed completely. It's just a black and a certain mess. And at that point, the cost of preparing it would be far more expensive than just strapping it or buying a new ship. Okay, it's the right off. Does he see anything suspicious? Well he's also looking for signs of how this fire started because as you pointed out,

it's not very smart, power-it- pirate behaviour to burn your prize once you board of us. You've gone to all the trouble to get a board, why burn it and leave. So one of the theories that was going around and was being used to explain this was that they'd fired a rocket propelled grenade and I'd started the fire. So he's, it, it, mock it was looking for signs of a rocket propelled grenade strike. He didn't find any. He was looking for science of AK-47 fire. He didn't find much of that either. And so what he came away with was this confused sensation of, you know, the evidence doesn't point to piracy, so what is it? And he has to return to aid and he sends his reports back to London and his photographs and all the evidence he's got and his initial assessment is there's something strange about

this incident the local authorities are suspicious and I'm gonna need to dig further to find out more. How much is the value of the ship? That's an interesting question. For insurance purposes the ship was valued at about $50 million. That's still quite a hefty investment as well. Yeah, but it was an old ship. It was towards the end of its life, and it wasn't in great shape. It was kind of a rusty wreck. So the actual value of the ship if they tried to sell it would be much less than that. Maybe down to $10 million or below.

All right, so what happens to David next? So he's back in Aden and he's doing his job, trying to talk into experts in the area, he's tapping up his local government sources, and a few days after his survey, he gets in his white Lexus to drive home for lunch, gets a few yards down the streets, and a car bomb that's been placed directly on his seat is detonated, which kills him instantly. Pretty serious. Yeah, it is an awful attack.

I mean, at the time the local media was saying this is another terrorist attack. This is another one of these militant groups that operate on the Arabian Peninsula. On the face of it, that seemed like a plausible explanation, but as soon as you look a bit more closely at the way he was killed, it doesn't make sense. The bomb wasn't a large scale destructive device designed to maim and cause terror. It was a very specific target hit TNT, remote detonated device. It was used, the sort of device they used in Yemen for political assassination. So it didn't fit with a sort of terrorist mo. And then

another big problem was in the immediate aftermath, no terror group claimed it. Now in Yemen, as in elsewhere, when a westerner was killed, when a British or American person was killed, the terror group behind it wanted the world to know they've done it. That's why they did his attacks in the first place, but no one claimed it. And so, you know, it started to look like he'd been killed for another reason, that he'd been targeted specifically for another reason. Is there anything interesting about Yemen or the structure there? Because it's, Somalia doesn't have a single government, right?

That's kind of still basically up for grabs by whichever person's the most ruthless. What's Yemen like? Yemen back then was under the dictatorship of a guy called President Salah who was a fairly bog standard developing world kleptocrat. He ran this corrupt network of cronies who made billions of dollars from the poorest country in the Middle East. least. It wasn't as chaotic as it since become, but at this particular moment, you know, the country was on the cusp of civil war. It was the start of the Arab Spring. So all these uprisings against corrupt dictatorships that started in Tunisia and spread across

the Middle East had arrived in Yemen and there were massive street protests. And President Salad reacted the way that it taters off and do, which is to send in troops to an open had arrived in Yemen and there were massive street protests and President Salah reacted the way that it taters off and do which is to send in troops to an open fire on peaceful protesters. So the situation in Yemen was chaotic and complicated for sure and it's definitely got worse since. Who investigates David Stethan? In the first instance it's the job of the Yemeni police. The local Yemeni CID is their job, but because this is a British citizen and because President Salah purportedly has good relations with European countries in the US, the British cops decide to send one of their detectives over

to liaises with the Yemeni colleagues. Of course, this guy, Jonathan Topman, he didn't have jurisdiction to investigate in Yemen, but he's there to offer assistance and I guess to try and find out as much information as he can for the British government and for Mochets family. So he goes out and joins the investigation. Do you find anything interesting? Yeah, we know about Jonathan Topman's work because at an inquest in today's mockets death a few months later, he explains what he did in Yemen and why. I guess the picture that emerges is of an investigation that doesn't really do anything you would want police investigators to do. There's no sort of forensic assessment of the crime scene.

David Mockett's laptop is destroyed and is never recovered. They refuse to release it to the British police. There's no serious investigation of who potentially might want to hurt David Mochett and why. The whole thing is kind of, you know, seems to be for show. But Jonathan Topman does learn one interesting thing, which is he's having dinner one night with some Yemeni policemen, and they share their feelings about what's happened.

And they say, no, they don't think this is terrorism. They think that David Mochette has been murdered because of his job, that he's been murdered because of some corrupt scheme to extract money from the shipping insurance industry. And that that was the reason for him to be tied to the ability to target it. It was a criminal act. And so Totman takes this information back to the inquest and he shares it with the Mochette family and the wider world. It's reported in the British press. And so now you have this insane situation where an old tanker has been attacked and burned in what looks increasingly like a fraud.

The one person sent to investigate the fun at the truth has been murdered by unknown criminal actors and what happens next? Well, nothing happens. There's no British police investigation. There's no pressure on the Yemeni government. Yemeni descends further into chaos and civil war. There's no criminal investigation into whatever insurance fraud might have happened.

Everything gets sort of clogged up in the administrative machine of the Lloyds of London insurance market. Well, why does anything start moving then? If everything's clogged up and everything's going slow and ground to a halt, why does something begin to pick back up? Well, the main reason for that is that the ship owner files insurance claim at Lloyds. The Greek ship owner files the claim and the value of that claim rises to over a hundred million dollars or in the region of a hundred million dollars because this guy is claiming not only for the value of the ship that's being destroyed, he's also claiming for lost profits

and interest. So the number keeps ticking up and it becomes. Oh, because the ship is not being used and by not having the ship is losing business, losing business, losing more business. So the number keeps ticking up and it becomes so large that it's kind of hard to ignore. Now even at Lloyds of London, the world's largest insurance market where I don't know, I think they pay out something like $200,000 every hour or some insane. You know, there's vast pools of capital out there almost unlimited. A hundred million dollars over one ship is still an enormous amount of money. So the insurers really have no choice but to dig a little deeper. And they have the good fortune to

to hire a legal team who use these investigators, these two former policemen from the Met Police in London, who now do private work for the insurance industry and others, and these two guys are brought in by the lawyers to do deeper investigation into what happened to the ship, and they have the mentality of crime fighters. They see something that to them looks like a criminal act act and their motivation is to solve it. At the same time, they're aware of what happened to David Mockett. They meet Mockett's family, his widow, and they see a kind of travesty of justice. So they become highly motivated, not just to solve the problem of this $100 billion insurance

claim, but also to get to something that looks like justice. They're the heroes of the story then, so far. In as much as this story, has heroes. Well, they're the only two between them and the top man guy. They're the only three people that haven't been dodgy yet. Everybody else is either dead or dodgy. They would probably dispute the characterization of them as heroes, but I definitely think when this incident happens,

the various actors reacted in different ways. Someone motivated by politics, someone motivated by money. There are very few people who made decisions based on integrity, which is I've seen something happen here and it's wrong. A really good guy was murdered, he left behind a wife and daughters and grandchildren, and I know I don't want to be part of that. Very few people made a moral decision about what to do next apart from our two investigators who were Richard Villan, Michael Conner, to the point where

they would be giving presentations in the Lloyds of London market that go to these glitzy office buildings in a room full of lawyers and insurance executives and they would bring up on the screen a picture of Moxett's burnt out car just to remind everyone that this isn't just an insurance contract, this isn't just a dollar dispute. The guy was murdered here, a really good man was murdered and we need to do something about it. What's happening with the investigation into the boat after Moxett dies? Because he was the first person on the scene, but presumably

there was subsequent investigations done after that. There were more forensic. Yeah, the ship was towed up to the United Arab Emirates and was inspected by various agencies, including the insurers, the US Navy's crime scene investigators unit showed up and had a look around. They were concerned the pirates might now start, if they were blowing up, oil tankers that were passing through the Middle East, that's something the Navy wanted to know about too. So the ship was picked over, but the fire is a wonderful way of hiding evidence. The ship was so badly damaged, there wasn't really much left for them to look at. They found some kind of suspicious

dense, like an explosive device had been detonated, but that was really the extent of the evidence. After that, the ship was sold for scrap, and it went off to the place where ships go to die, which are these semi-legal ship-breaking yards in Pakistan and India, where they get driven up onto the beach and picked apart by hand, and all the metal bits taken away and sold. And so, the ship was literally torn to pieces, the evidence was gone. The barrels of oil must have been taken away and put onto some other ship to transport it away. Yeah, they managed to, one of the salvage crews managed to salvage the oil they siphoned it off onto another ship, as you say, and that was taken away.

But that still left a very large insurance claim for the ship itself, which was damaged beyond repair. But the problem they had, like I say, is that the evidence was gone, destroyed or burned or scrapped. There was lots of expert opinion about the cause of the fire and lots of legal back and forth about the various depths of the ship owner. But what they were lacking was really clear evidence that a crime had taken place. What they needed was to speak to people who were on the vessel at the time, who were around in the immediate aftermath,

who might actually be able to say, here's what happened to the ship, here was the cause of the fire. Who's this dodgy Greek salvage guy then? How does he come into it? Vasilios Vergos is his name. He was, I told you about the salvage crew that arrived really quickly from Aden on the M&E coast. And Vasilius Burgess is the guy who won that salvage outfit, which is called Poseidon Salvich. And now he's a whole lot of the character. He's a former Greek navy diver. He was in the Greek Navy's elite diving school.

And he was badly injured in a diving accident. I think he got the bends and left him with a lifelong limp and a bad temper. And he's made this strange life for himself in Yemen. He basically lives on a rusty salvage barge, doing bits and bobs for the various Yemeni projects, but he's going to famously got a bad temper. So he's first on the scene and he gets, he gets the Blanty

Virtue also in like four hours from nearby Aiden, which is astonishingly fast. I mean, like he was on the scene so quickly that he must have woken up immediately on getting the call, started his engine and bolted straight for the ship, like a remarkable feat of efficiency. But there's lots of questions about him. You know, the first one being, well, how did he know to be ready in the middle of the night in Yemen? How did he get there so fast? You know, he has one of these characters

that investigators look at and they see his track records. And, you know, maybe he's not in the elite ranks of salvage crews. There's a famous Dutch company that's famous all over the world. He's kind of on one of the lower rungs of the ladder. He's got one of his ram shackle operations. Who's the other Greek guy, that's Super Mario guy, that's not the same person, is it? No, so Super Mario was the guy who owned the Brelante Virtue, so he's the big tycoon. And he's got a fleet of tankers and container ships that he operates around the world.

And he's part of the Greek shipping class, which is to say that he's very rich. He lives in Greece, pays almost no tax. And he lives his kind of life of bond villain luxury, running his fleets. His particular hobby is racing cars, he's a rally driver, and he's actually quite good, he does competitive racing around Greece, and he'll win competitions, he's a good driver. And racing rally cars was always his first passion. But he sort of fell into the family business of running a fleet.

And he's a relatively prominent character in Greece. I mean, he owns the main fast fairy line between the mainland and the holiday islands. So anyone who's been sort of boating around Greek may well have been one of his vessels, companies called C-Jets. So he has this big reputation, and it turns out that he's the owner of the Brilante.

Risk taker. Yes. Adrenaline junkie guy mixed with, disgruntled, one and a half legged, Greek salvage owner. Yes. Again, we're just continuing to add more and more dodgy people one and a half legged Greek salvage owner. Yes. But again, we're just continuing to add more and more dodgy people to this list. Didn't some dude from Lloyd's say that this had happened before at the funeral?

Didn't he tell the wife that it had happened before? Yeah, I mean, one of the things the investigators ran into early was, although it may be hard to believe, sometimes the Lloyds of London insurance market doesn't know who owns the ship's their insurance. All they see is a brass plate company name with a generic title, but they might not know who the beneficial owner is. So the first job they had in the aftermath of the attack was to find out who actually

owned the Brilante. And the insurance guys didn't know they thought it was they thought it was some other entity and then they discovered it was Marius Ilyopoulos and you know there was a immediate name recognition they knew that name the reason they knew his name was that another ship owned by him had gotten to trouble only a few miles away a couple of years earlier it had mysteriously there'd been a fire on the bridge. It'd run into a sand bank,

and the salvage operation had gone disastrously wrong, and the ship ended up splitting into like a watermelon. And the other thing that caught the investors, the investigators' attention was that it was exactly the same salvage crew who arrived with a remarkable speed from Aden to help out. It's our old friend, Vasilius Virgos, the limping Greek diver. So he's on the scene as well.

So he's got same ship owner, same salvage crew. And remarkably, the chief engineer, the Filipino chief engineer, was the same on both voyages as well. Do one that stuck about for two hours. So yeah, yeah, so, you know, one unfortunate accident off the coast of Yemen is bad luck. Two is probably something else. Dude, I can't face so ridiculous how sort of flagrant and blatant the dodgyness is. Alright, so what what happens next? It seems like all of the pieces at least start to come together, but resumably the investigators other than coincidence, the investigators don't really seem to have much to tie people together yet.

They don't have a lot of physical evidence, no. And they're also battling against this this kind of institutional complacency that you get in the city of London in lots of industries to be fair, but also in the insurance industry where, you know, Lloyds of London has been running for 500 years. For 500 years, it's been a reliable source of income for the British middle and upper classes, you know, the elites of London life. They quietly make tons of money at Lloyds. They would much prefer to do so without any fuss or attention. It's a great business for them to be in. They get to go to the pub for lunch and they have wonderful bespoke suits and they have this privilege existence.

They're not very incentivized to look closely at the nasty criminal parts of the shipping industry. It's just no reason for them to do it. You might imagine that if there's fraudulent insurance claims being made, it would be expensive for them to pay. And so they wouldn't pay them, they would fight. But actually the reverse is true. It's actually, in most cases, a lot easier just to pay to make these problems go away and then pass the cost on to the customers by raising your premiums

Which is what Lloyd's has been doing for hundreds of years? It sounds like the shipping industry that Dodging us is so endemic That what are you gonna do? You're gonna fight this one guy? Well, what about the next guy and what about the next guy? Every single one of the claims that could be made is going to come from someone that has a shell company in Bermuda. And it didn't you say that most of the company,

like each boat is owned by a single company. Yeah, it's a single ship system. Yeah, it's partly the scale of the problem, but also unfortunately fraud and criminality has kind of been built in to the cost structure of the Lloyds of London insurance market They know it happens. They know that it's expensive and they tolerate it They figure that Let's say one in 50 this is I'm making this number up. Yeah, let's say, one in 50, I'm making this number up, let's say one in 50

ship casualties isn't an accident. It's been done on purpose to get the insurance money. They figure it simpler, to pay that one in 50 and keep doing what they've been doing, rather than go through big expensive legal battles, rather than go through all the terrible publicity of accusing a customer of fraud, and rather than actually facing up to the fact that there's this really nasty criminal underworld that's kind of attached itself to the shipping business. So rather than do any of those things, they just pay, and they keep doing what they've always been doing. So, you know, are two investigators in this story, Richard Villan-Michael Conner,

they constantly encounter this reluctance to go and get the answers they need. They are prevented from doing the investigation they want to do. They're not allowed to interview the crew. As crazy as that sound, they won't give an access to the crew. There are a load of sources that they identify who might have information about how the ship was attacked. They are prevented from going to do that. And the situation becomes really tense and kind of conflicted where they're fighting against their own legal team and saying we need to do more. They've been brought in by Lloyds of London, though. So it does seem that Lloyds of London

felt like presumably they can't bring in this level of investigation for every one of these. If you've said that it's easier for Lloyds to pay out, it seems like they've maybe got something in the side of their minds that's made them think there's something up here that's bringing these grizzled old Met officers in to come and do a bit of work. I'd love to tell you that the thing that made this exceptional was that David Mocket was murdered and then there may be some truth in that but the evidence doesn't necessarily point that way. The evidence just points to the fact that once this claim reached a certain size, once they were on the hook for a certain sum of money, they decided it was time to fight because they didn't want to

just pay. And their own lawyers have written in legal filings that they would have been happy to settle this case had the sum of money not being so large. Wow. Okay, so what happens next? So next it's, it's full speed ahead in this lawsuit between the Greek Shipponah and the Lloyds of London insurers. And things get really messy and dangerous quite quickly.

The Shipponah Super Mario is incredibly hostile to any attempt by the insurers to get information out of him. He isn't handing over evidence. You know, a hard drive, full of emails go missing, it all becomes quite threatening. And this is where I enter the story because at the time I was covering the courts in London and I'd sort of become aware of the Brilante Virtue Oso incident and I happened across on the court lists one day seeing the name of the company that owned the ship in one of the big courts in London. I just turned up and what I stumbled into was Super Mario

the ship owner had been summoned by London judge to give evidence in the case and I've been to hundreds and hundreds of commercial trials. I've never seen anything quite like this. He was a bellercoast and angry and belligerent waving his finger. At one point he threatened the English lawyers. You just don't see these things in the rarefides, sort of, world of London law. It was frankly very entertaining and a little amusing. And then at the end of these two days of incredibly fraught cross-examination, he walks out of court and is arrested by the City of London

Police for fraud accused of fraud. Well, he's arrested on suspicion of a fraud against the Lloyds of London insurance market. Oh, so for this, this wasn't him getting picked up for something else, this is something else else being picked up for this, right? It's for the Brilante Virtueoso. And so I've walked into this mad situation where there's a simultaneous, very hostile lawsuit and criminal investigation and this remarkable character of a ship owner. And that's where I sort of pick up the story. It takes a good few months after that to unravel what's happening because all that I've told you so far is happening behind closed doors in the city of London.

So it took us quite a while to get up to speed on exactly who's- Where did you get- Where did you do your investigation then? How did you get any of this information from behind closed doors? Well, it took about four or five years of talking to people mainly. We did about 150 interviews. We compiled loads of documentation. The lawsuit helped because anytime there's a lawsuit, you get a backbone of documentary

evidence that's relatively reliable. But the lawsuit didn't deal with a lot of things we wanted answers to. We wanted to know more about David Mockett's life and death. We wanted to know more about the sailors on the ship and what their experience had been like. So we had to take what had been done so far and try and push it forward and go to places that police haven't been, go to places that the insurance investigators couldn't go and get the answers no one else could. What ended up happening with Super Mario then? Was he released back to Greece? as no one else could. What ended up happening with Super Mario then? Was he released back to Greece?

Super Mario was released without charge. He, no commented his interview, didn't get many information. They searched his room, but, no, they let him go and I don't think he'll ever come back to London. Yeah, I think that that's right. And then David's death has anyone been charged with that? No, no one's ever been charged with David's death. David's death, unfortunately, which is a continuing source of pain for his widow. If you can imagine losing someone in your

life that you really care about, that's hard enough, devastated his family, they were just about to retire as well. And she spent her whole life away from David. He'd been at sea or working in ports around the world for their whole married life together. And he was just about to retire, and they were going to finally spend some time together. So she's been left with a terrible whole in her life. But I think it's been made worse by the fact that there's been no reconciliation.

There's been no attempt to punish the act of murder. If anything, for a few years afterwards, the whole thing was completely forgotten about no one wanted to talk about it. No one even paid her a visit. The insurance companies that hired David Mockett never once contacted her to say anything, let alone apologize, or offer her something

by way of an explanation. So that makes the grief a lot harder to process, I think, because there's this unresolved pain that she's never been able to get over. Is there an insurance policy for people like market going out to dangerous countries? There was, but his local employer in Yemen did a run-up and she never got any of that money.

Yeah. Oh my God. Isn't insurance a funny thing? No, no, it's not. It's just tragic. It's not funny in the slightest. Okay, so Super Mario's back in Greece. He's been released without charge after no commenting.

David Mockett's death hasn't been investigated and evidence will have been frittered away. It's in a country with even worse political standing than it was 11 years ago when all of this happened. Has the payout to Super Mario's company been agreed yet, or is that still ongoing? So, the one thing that has been resolved in all this mess is what happened to the Brilante Virtuoso, and after a very long, a techy trial, a high court judge in London ruled that the ship had been deliberately burned by members of the Yemeni Coast Guard who had been hired by Mario Ciliopolis and his associates, including the Cilius Virgos, the limping salver, in a sort of pre-planned active insurance

fraud where Super Mario was short of money, he was desperately short of cash. The Brilante was hemorrhaging losses for him and he needed a way to get rid of his ship and they came up with this kind of hair-brained conspiracy where they were gonna make it look like a pirate attack but hire some guys to come on board and start a fire and wreck the ship.

They very nearly got away with it, and they chose wisely in terms of the location for their fraud, because they did it in Yemen. Yemen is an impossible place for anyone to operate. It's been in a brutal civil war for years. It's had outbreaks of cholera and COVID, Saudi bombs fall on all the time. They chose very cleverly, which is probably the reason most of the perpetrators have escaped justice. In fact, all of the perpetrators have escaped justice. But importantly, for our understanding of what happened, the judge

found that, yes, it was a conspiracy. Yes, it was done at the behest of Super Mario. Yes, Vasilius Vervos was involved. And so we got a little bit closer to the truth. How did he know that it was Coast Guard repurposed as pirates? He... So, I think to answer that question, you have to look at how crime works on an international, sort of complicated level. And when you're talking about transnational crime, drug running, people smuggling, there are sort of loosely affiliated international

networks of criminals. The Italian Mathia will be loosely affiliated with the Irish mob and the Colombian cartels. And they're not sort of locked together in an iron-clad conspiracy. They work with each other when it's financially beneficial to do so. Friendship can be against each other. Yeah, and you know, so the Greek criminal cartel that arranged the attack on the ship and

profited from it had local fixers in Aden, and one of them was the Sirlius Virgos, this incredible character who teamed up with a local businessman and they managed to get access to the local power structure in Yemen. I don't know, of course, back then in Yemen, probably as now, it's not very difficult to get access to the local power structure if you're willing to throw some money around. So it wasn't very actually very difficult for them to find Yemeni Coast Guard members who are willing to do a job for a bit of extra cash. Has Vasilius been charged?

No, he's never been charged with a crime. I should say that although he doesn't exactly deny the allegations against him, we are the only ones as far as I know we've ever spoken to him about it. We managed to reach him by phone shortly before the book was finished. As far as I know, he's still in Greece. What do you like? What do you like to speak to? Well, let me tell you this. When we sent him a bi-text, a list of sort of bullet points of the things that we were about to publish in our book,

this is sort of standard journalistic practice, you're going to write something about someone, they should have a right to know, they should have a right to reply. So we did this process and we sent him the text and his reply was a smiling, crying with laughter emoji, which sort of tells you something about his attitude to sort of allegations of criminality and wrongdoing, doesn't seem to be overly concerned about them. He didn't engage much more than that quite frankly. He didn't really engage with all the evidence against him and what was said by the London judge.

All he would say to us was this is ridiculous. How would I know? And all the evidence has been made up by people who are trying to blackmail me. And then he sort of cut off contact. So where's the investigation at now and what do you think is going to happen in the near future? Well, the sort of cause of Cynthia Mocha has been picked up by a local MP in Devon who's raised it in the House of Parliament. and he called it a Traviti as justice, and he sort of, he asked the question

of the justice minister, the head of the Justice Department, what are we going to do about this? And I think the police has attitude is that, it's not our job to investigate a murder in Yemen. And of course, they're right about that. They have no jurisdiction to go over to Aden and start throwing people in the back of police vans. But the point of Cynthia Mochette and of Michael Conrad, actually, the investigator who's been helping her is that you don't

need to prosecute that crime. You can treat this as a financial crime. You can do what they did to Al Capone. They've got them on his taxes. Treat this as an act of maritime piracy and an act of insurance fraud, and then you can start to bring charges. But no one's been willing to do that. And I think it's clear the British police see it as too difficult and too problematic to pursue a case. But it's not too late.

As the SMP pointed out, the evidence is still there. Someone could pick this up and pursue it from a law enforcement point of view. It would just take a little bit of will and bravery. So it remains to be seen whether that will happen. And the money to Super Mario wasn't paid out. Is that case being finished now with Lodz? The lawsuit is ended and it ended up as kind of like a peric victory for the insurers because they won the case, you know, technically they won the case. The judge found that they didn't have to pay on the insurance claim because it was a fraud. But they didn't actually win in any real sense because

Super Mario managed to extricate himself from the legal process. Because he refused to hand over Evan, because he basically didn't play the game of London litigation the way you're supposed to. He just cut himself off from the process. His claim was thrown out, but he had an existing insurance policy that he's from his bank. His lenders who lent him money to buy the boat had their own insurance policy. So they continued the case against the London insurers. So the law so ended up as insurer versus insurer, which group of insurers were going to pay for the damage the plant had but also Super Mario got away.

And basically what he had at the start of this was an aging, rusting, useless, money-loothing, oil tanker. He burned it. Oh, and he had, sorry, he had about $60 million in loans to cover the cost of that oil tanker. He burned his own ship. He was free from his loans. His debt went to zero on the ship. He was also free to give his money-loosing ship. So by some standards, you could say he's won. He's probably at least tens of millions of dollars better off than he would have been if he hadn't sunk his own ship.

Which is one of the crazy things about this story, one of the things that still blows my mind. Sure, I can't believe it. This story is insane. Or can't, dude, congratulations on the lengthy and very impressive investigation. The book's great. The story's fantastic. If people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do or your further investigation

with regards to the story, you did a great piece on the ever given and what that caused as well, where should they go to to keep up to date with your work? You can follow me on Twitter at Kitshalel, like any vein journalist, I post all my stories on there. Yeah, and check out dead in the water. Look, it's Father's Day is coming up. If you know someone in your life who loves sort of crazy yons about life on the open sea, this is definitely one of those. I've been doing this job a long time and I've never seen anything quite like this. Chris, I appreciate you. Cheers.

Thanks man. you