The Jordan Harbinger Show - 896: Captain Max Hardberger | The Man Who Steals Ships from Pirates

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Recovering stolen ships from pirates in the world's most troubled waters is big business, and Captain Max Hardberger is here to steer us through it. What We Learn in Conversation with Captain Max Hardberger: Not all pirates are impoverished desperados with nothing to lose — the most vicious ones wear suits and hobnob with royalty. The surprising places where ships are illegitimately seized by the rich and powerful who know how to play the game. When ship owners can't recover their seized property through legal channels in corrupt courts, they turn to people like Captain Max Hardberger. How Max determines if someone's claim to a seized ship is valid, or if they're trying to scam him into heisting somebody else's property. The extreme "extraction" methods Max is prepared to employ when ships can't be reclaimed by mere paperwork. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/896 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

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Today we're talking to a high seas repo man, literally a good pirate, well figuratively, I suppose, in some ways. He takes ships that are taken hostage, incorrupt ports. His job is to essentially sneak onto seized ships, illegally seized ships, and get those ships back to their rightful owner. So he will quite literally sneak onto boats in the middle of the night and commandeer them while making sure that the local authorities are none the wiser. This is some pretty crazy stuff in countries where one would definitely not ever want to go to prison. I think you're going to love the fact that this job even exists. I mentioned this guy before on my episode with Ian Urb.

You know, we talked about it, high-seas repo man. Well, this is the guy. So here we go with Captain Max Hardberger. So you repossess and or re-steel ships for a living. Is the correct term really just repossess, or am I close enough with re-steel? Because it certainly sounds like that. Well, I don't like to use the word steel. Of course.

In fact, we always work under the color of law. But the fact of the matter is that we are either repossessors on behalf of a mortgagee, or we are reclaimers on behalf of some other party, and normally would be the owner. So I guess it would be a repossession because the owner was in possession before his ship was seized. So we're repossessing the ship for the owner.

In essence, we're repo men. Yeah, this makes a lot of sense, although I think a lot of folks are shocked that there are boat repo men, and they think that if there are, they're probably repowing fishing boats, not cargo ships and tankers. Is it cargo ships and tankers primarily

that you go for, you and your crew? Yes, that's our specialty. We work with a company called National Liquidators who operate in the United States, and they do repossess fishing boats and pleasure craft and so on. We do not operate in the United States. So when they have a job outside the States,

they come to us, when we have a job in the States, we go to them. Our specialty is reclaiming ships that have been illegitimately seized, either by a private party or more often by a government. And you say you don't work in the United States, I assume because if you take my boat from me, I sue you and the law, which is functioning in this country for the most part, helps me get that

ship back. Precisely. In fact, we don't operate in any country that has a functioning series of laws and a procedure in place for a legitimate owner to make a claim against an illegitimate seizure. Right. Interesting. Because, of course, countries that have no good rule of law off pretend they do. I mean, there's no place with clearer law than maybe North Korea, right, where everything is against the law.

But there's no actual rule of law, right? It's all just sort of a function of the dictator of the state. I suppose you have a list of places where, okay, this is what we consider to be a place with rule of law, and these are the places we work that we consider to not have any legitimate rule of law. How do you make that determination? Oh, I don't go in there with any preconceived notion. Even Venezuela has laws. They're not followed, but they exist. Haiti has laws. Unfortunately, the Haitian lawyers have no concept of what the law is because there are no law books.

But the fact of the matter is, the laws do exist somewhere. What I do when we are assigned a case is I will look into the situation and, in fact, I have to get on the ground. So that if there is a possibility of taking the ship out legally, that's what I prefer to do. quite often I'll work with the correspondent, that's the insurance person, the lawyer in the local jurisdiction. I'll work with the port authorities. I would do almost anything to get the ship out, including some things that I probably couldn't do here in the States without having to do a middle of the night extraction. That's the last resort. Of course. I would imagine calling you generally is the last resort for any company that decides they need to give you a call. it's probably a pretty bad day in the office for them.

Nobody ever calls to say, look, everything's going great with my ship. So who steals the ship in the first place? Because a common misconception is that pirates are only the guys and some off the coast of Somalia who come up in a Dow with an RPG and say, we're getting on the boat and we're going to drive it back to wherever and hold it for ransom. Your pirates wear designer suits, probably. I've dealt with Somali pirates as well,

but they are not actually nearly as much a threat, as are the quasi-legitimate pirates who operate under what they like to call the color of law. Venezuela, Haiti, Dominican Republic. In fact, there are some other countries where this operates as well that we would think are law-abiding countries. Greece, for example,

Greece is a very bad place to get your ship seized, and Greek law is very pliable when it comes to seizing ships. The Greeks have been doing this for 4,000 years, and they know exactly how to do it. Yeah, I've heard that the Greek shipping industry is essentially, I could be talking out of school here, above the law, right? It's just, it's all of these same guys from the same small island villages. They all run the major shipping in and out of Greece. And they have a lot of political capital. And I think there's a lot of exemptions and a lot of tax exemptions and a lot of what they say goes kind of stuff. And so despite Greece being in the EU, with shipping, it's almost a free-for-all in some ways. Or at least you have to follow what the magnates at the top, does. side you're going to do. Well, it's not just the Greeks, though. Once you get beyond the 12-mile limit, you're in the open ocean and you're beyond the reach of any warship other than your own nation's warships. So when you consider that the greatest number of ships in the world are flagged by Liberia,

Liberia has no navy. Liberia cannot inspect a single ship beyond their 12-mile limit. They may have some patrol boats. But the fact of the matter is that if a Liberian flagged ship does something wrong on the open ocean, no one has the authority to intercept it except the warships of Liberia. Of course, what happens is another warship, let's say a U.S. warship will follow the vessel. They'll get the Liberian ambassador to give them permission, which Liberia does freely. But the point is that Panama and Liberia have very little interest in controlling their tonnage. They're only interested in getting the money for the tonnage. And after you've paid your dues and gotten your flag and gotten your certificates,

you can pretty much do what you want. Yeah, we did an episode on Flags of Convenience, Episode 739, where we talk about why Liberia, which has no Navy and Panama, have most of the world's ships are flagged there. It's taxes, convenience, compliance, all kinds of reasons. So these ships you end up repossessing. They go into a port to what, deliver cargo, and then they just can't leave?

Is that how it works? It sounds like they roll in thinking everything's Huggedy Dory and then they can't leave. Yeah, there are various reasons. When Common Scenario is a shoreside pirate who has fraudulently made a claim against the ship and has gotten a judge. In fact, in Haiti, a Justice of the Peace

in a little hut on the beach can actually seize a $10 million ship. So you just have to go to a local authority, pay a little money, either some on top and some below the table, and then you get paperwork, which is called papering the ship. When you go on board and you slap a notice on the wheelhouse window, and papering the ship is the act of seizing the ship. Now the owner, if it's that kind of situation, can try to fight it legally, but very often he will find that there is no fighting it in the local court, and that's when he comes to us. Okay, so these are corrupt port of things.

officials who are essentially in the business alongside a judge or whatever of saying, oh, this boat hit the dock and it caused damage and we're going to keep it because of our laws that allow us to do that. And then somebody says, wait a minute, that's my $15 million ship. What do you mean you're keeping it? I want it back. And they say, Tuft Kishka, as my grandma would say, you're out of luck. And then that's when they call you. Essentially, there are other scenarios as well, but that's a common one. When I was prepping, a lot of people were saying, I, steals the ship. You don't steal the ship. you simply bring the ship to a place that respects international law.

That's it. That's correct. Yeah, that sounds like a very useful service. And I know you're also an attorney and so as your business partner. That makes a lot of sense because I would imagine you have to do some diligence to make sure you're not just being set up by somebody who wants you to steal a ship for them in contradiction of international law. That's why our billing is always two stage.

The first stage is our investigation in which normally involves me going on the ground and finding out what is happening and why the ship has been seized. A number of times we have been approached by owners, perhaps sometimes Greek owners, who think that we can help them avoid paying a legitimate debt. Once we find that out, then that's the end of the job. If we decide that our client has a righteous claim to his own vessel or a mortgagee to the vessel, then we will make a second tier, a second tranche in which we receive a second payment. estimated expenses. And that's when we begin the actual operation. That makes sense, right. So you want to make sure you get paid. Because if you find out it's not a legitimate job and you spent 40 hours flying

somewhere to look at a dock that was supposedly hit and it was hit and they do owe the money. They're not going to pay you if you then suddenly ask for the money saying, hey, I'm not going to help you. By the way, that'll be $14,000, right? So it makes sense. Get some of that money up front. It makes sense that some folks anywhere are trying to hoodwink you into taking a ship. that wasn't held by a valid claim. Some of these claims are probably quite expensive, right? You're looking at what damage cargo, damage to the dock. What other reasons can somebody legitimately steal or seize a ship? Oh, well, there are Chandler debts, fuel debts. A ship normally will encumber itself in almost every port it goes with repair costs. And of course, there's the pilotage, there's tug costs. There are various charges that the ship will have

to pay before it leaves. Normally, those are not the problems. Those costs are normally dealable even if you're a pirate, you will pay that rather than have to deal with losing your ship. Our situation is normally a very expensive cargo damage or a dock damage. Or in the case of, for example, one of our more famous operations was the motor vessel Patrick M out of Venezuela, in which the scam was a Peruvian crime family chartered our vessel with the express purpose of seizing it. They sent it to a port that Porto Cabello where they already had the situation in hand

and they had a Venezuelan subsidiary ready to pay for the ship as soon as we arrived. What they did was they refused to pay the freight to carry the cargo from Peru to Venezuela. Every ship has the right to refuse to open its hatches if its freight has not been paid. That's international law. The captain refused to open the hatch.

The Venezuelan subsidiary then went to the court and said, we have been harmed by the delay in opening the hatch, and we therefore want this ship. And, of course, their harm in the 24-hour delay would have been very minor, but the ship was seized and the ship was going to remain seized for months and months. And the owner of the ship, he named the ship after his father, Patrick M. Jim Mahler was the owner.

He came to Venezuela and he was distraught. The captain of the ship was so nervous and so beside himself that the captain refused to take it out. And although I was only port captain, I decided I wasn't going to let that happen either. So I sneaked on board. And the crew was cooperative. They didn't want to stay there either.

So we got the engine started and got out. Yeah, I want to get into some of the details of how that stuff happens. So these ships get stolen because they get seized for a reason, in your case, that's not legitimate, right? some corrupt port decides, hey, we're going to steal this boat by refusing to pay for the cargo hatch, the cargo delivery. And then is the plan to use the boat? Is the plan to just sell the boat to somebody else and say, hey, we seized a $15 million boat. Here it is for $10 million,

$1 million in bribery across whoever needs to get bribed. And it's a pretty decent business. And margins could be pretty big on stealing something as expensive as a ship. Some of these guys would run it themselves if they are experienced ship owners. But normally, Normally, especially if the port is the one involved, their interest is in selling the ship. There's a ready market for ships. And don't forget, once a ship goes through a judicial auction, all prior claims are wiped clean. Wow. Even fraudulent actions have no bearing once the gavel comes down.

That's why with that vessel, the Maya Express, the auction was going to be on Thursday, and we didn't get the ship out until Tuesday, but we knew we had to do it. Even though Tuesday was a full moon, it was a terrible night for me, because you cannot imagine how bright it was a full moon on a cloudless night in Haiti. But the thing about it was we couldn't wait. Once the gavel came down on Thursday, our client was completely out of luck. And the guy who planned to steal the ship would have the ship free and clear. Wow.

So they don't even have to vanish the boat by changing the name and turning off the transponder and moving it around and hiding it. They can just say, oh, we legally auctioned this off. And yeah, this thing was stolen from somebody. Maybe we don't know. It doesn't matter. It's been auctioned. And now this person has good, free and clear titles.

So Tufkishka, again, sorry, I've got to stop using that. But like, the ship is then free to use. That's a really good racket for a criminal. I've taken zero maritime law classes in law school. So I know absolutely nothing about this. But it makes sense they would have to have that free and clear because if this is 500 years ago or whatever, when they wrote this law, you don't know that some ship that's from Greece that's now in Antwerp

has an action against it in Portugal. You just bought the ship from a guy, so you have to draw the line somewhere in an era with pretty much zero communication, and that was the most expeditious way to do it back then. And they haven't really decided to revamp this for reasons that perhaps make sense when you dig a little bit. But wow, so they really can't just grab your stuff and auction it off, and you can't do anything about it. That is just bananas. So you really are under pressure.

Yeah, I was that night. I do know in normal law, you file a lawsuit against an individual or an entity. If you crash into my front gate, I sue you, you pay me or the insurance company does. But in maritime law, correct me where I'm wrong here, your claim is against the ship itself, correct? Yes, that's correct. It's a unique feature of maritime law. It's an in-rim claim as opposed to an in-personum claim, and the ship itself is the defendant. So the pleading will read Allied stevedores versus the M.V. Savilla.

And if no one defends the ship, then the ship obviously can't defend itself and it gives up. Right, okay. For the legal nerds like me, maybe just super early versions of international law. You can't sue somebody from Greece if you're in England in 1702 or whatever. It's hard to do it even now. So you just seize the ship to settle the debt. And the bandits that you are repossessing these boats from, they abuse that system deliberately. because that's their business model. That's correct.

They have found a way to legitimize a immoral action. And unfortunately, the realities of international shipping are such that it's not easy to change this regiment. So it's still that case today. Where is most of this type of work? You said Haiti earlier. Where else? Venezuela, Trinidad, Dominican Republic.

I did one job out of Mexico. Africa, Greece, that's about it. Okay. Are there any places you won't or can't work? I mean, you mentioned places with functional rule of law. That's not really what I'm getting at. What about, like, Iran or China? After having spent some months in Somalia,

I'm not so worried about these other countries. In fact, they might be a little bit more conducive to pleasant living. So I don't have any preconceived rejections. I probably would not go to North Korea, but who knows? my business partner and I will listen to all approaches. Yeah, North Korea might be a tough one, just because of the logistics involved. And, yeah, we've all seen what happens there. What about Cuba? Cuba's an interesting case, right?

Because it's so close to the United States, and yet that could be a complicated working environment. Yes, I think if we did anything in Cuba, we would be working with the State Department. We would not be doing anything in Cuba on our own individually. We've worked with the U.S. government before in some politically sensitive matters, and one was involving a tanker off the Venezuelan coast. So we will investigate, and we will charge for our investigation, and then we'll see after that whether we go on with the project. But obviously, North Korea, Cuba, probably Yemen,

there are probably some other places where we would have to charge a lot of money. I suppose the pricing is dependent upon the value of the vessel and also just how likely things are to go belly up. Exactly. We quite honestly factor that in. The risk involved is part of our calculus as to what it's going to take because there is a point at which we will turn the job down.

In fact, there was a Venezuelan job, which would have been quite remunitative, but the chance of the crew getting killed by a Venezuelan helicopter because the Venezuelans don't respect the 12-mile limit. So even though we had a plan to get, the vessel out beyond the 12-mile limit before dawn. Being towed would mean that at a four or five-not speed within an hour or so a Venezuelan helicopter could catch up with us in

international water, and I could not guarantee to the crew that the Venezuelan helicopter would not shoot them out of the water. Oh, my gosh. So the 12-mile limit is the line at which a coast becomes international waters, 12 miles off. At that point, it sounds like you were worried that the military or Coast Guard whatever of Venezuela would just come and sink the actual ship because it was being taken out. And that being an international water, they just don't care about that. Yeah, that was my fear. Wow. Yeah, you did the right thing. I mean, people's lives are always going to be more valuable than a tanker, even if it is full of oil and worth a lot of money. At least that's where I fall on it. It sounds like you think similarly. I do. Is it always corrupt

ports where you go after ships? I'm wondering, what happens if I buy a $10 million yacht in my dreams. I put the payment down, and then I take it to my friend's uncle's port over in Granada or whatever, the Caribbean, Dominican Republic. And I say, this is my boat now, right? I'm the captain now. And just never pay the rest of the mortgage or the loan on the boat. Am I going to get a visit from Max Hardberger and associates, or are you going to say, look, here's a couple people that go after yachts. I'm after cargo and tankers only. Our restriction is on acting outside of the United States and outside of countries with the rule of law. We have possessed aircraft.

We've repossessed ferries. The vessels are not that small because we're so expensive that the vessel has to bear the cost. But we've been approached on various other projects, like, for example, a submarine in Russia and so on. That's very specialized. Did you turn that one down? That seems like it would be a little bit scary. You got to really know what you're doing. Well, it was an interesting story, but we didn't get the submarine.

How do you even find? I guess it's in port, right, so it's not underwater. A submarine, is it substantially similar to a tanker or cargo ship? It seems like there's some quite specialized navigation and controls. Because you're not talking about a small submarine that you're riding around looking at fish, right? This is a giant military-grade vessel, I assume. This was a whiskey-class Russian sub based on the World War II German design. There were a dozen of them in Kaliningrad, and one of them was operational and used for training.

as a matter of fact. Submarines are very seaworthy. Submarine can go around the world because it has so little exposed wind resistance and so much of the hull is in the water that actually submarines on the surface, not below, but on the surface they're quite seaworthy. That would just be terrifying. Okay, let me back up. This is a Russian submarine in a Russian enclave, Kaliningrad, in Eastern Europe or in the Baltics, essentially. Who wants that that isn't the Russian government? Who has any claim to that? that isn't the Russian government? That was a little bit different.

Without going into too much of the politics, at the time Peru and Ecuador were at war. Peru had just bought a German diesel submarine, and Ecuador felt that it had to have a submarine also, but he couldn't afford a new German diesel submarine. So that was the background. Ah, okay, interesting. Yeah, that's a story for another day.

I'd love to back up a little bit and ask how you got into this because it seems, obviously you have a background in seafaring, but who decides one day to call you and say, hey, I've got a very unique problem. Can you handle it? And then what sort of possesses you to say, I can do that. I can take that ship back for you?

Well, no, it wasn't a conscious decision. After I took Patrick M. out of Venezuela, there was an article written about it in a shipping magazine. And it's a small community, especially down in Miami, where I was living at the time. So my buddies and I would get together

around the Miami River and laugh about this thing and so on. But it wasn't long after that. that a fellow called me and he had gotten his ship seized in Trinidad. So I took that one out. And then, of course, some years later, when Michael Bono was thinking about doing the same thing from a lawyer standpoint, he couldn't find anybody else who would actually go in to do it. And when we got together, it worked out. This is such a very unique line of work. How many other people in the world do this kind of thing?

You've got to be one of a small group. There's a company in England that does it. I don't think they're very active now, but Traditionally, they were quite active when we started. They were our major competitors. I had a very good friend named John Lightbone, who's now passed, who had also on his own, like me, would do this for clients. He was an amazing fellow, both a chief engineer and a captain. There are very few people in the world who are both unlimited chief engineers and unlimited

masters. But other than that, no, I don't really know of too many people. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Captain Max Hardberger. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, the authors, thinkers, creators, and high seas repo men every single week. It is because of my network, the circle of people that I know like and trust that are around me. I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for yourself for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com

slash course. This is about improving your relationship building skills in a way that doesn't make you look like an a hole or make you feel super awkward. It doesn't take a ton of time. It's going to make you a better colleague, a better friend, a better connector, a better peer. just a few minutes a day and many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course all for free at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Captain Max Hardberger. This sounds like a combination between intelligence and extraction work, because you don't just run into the port and grab the boat,

right? You mentioned you go down and investigate the claim first, but that can't be all you do, right? I assume you're also looking at, okay, is the claim valid? If so, how? How do you? You know, am I going to get this thing out of here? Is there fuel in the boat? And how are you doing this? Do you act like a tourist? Or do you say, look, I'm here from the owner and I want to take a look around the ship and they let you do that? Well, my modus operandi generally involves getting on the ground at the port where the ship is and going to the bars that are closest to the ship where the ship's crew are going to be hanging out and maybe suborning the ladies a little bit. What does suborning the ladies mean. I mean you had a translation on that one. Well, the background is that the Caribbean is full of old

white men, old ship captains from Europe mostly, but some Americans, who have retired to the ports where they spent their life and they pick up a young local lady as a girlfriend, or wife. And that's such a common phenomenon in these South American ports that for me to go and hire a girl to hang out with me, she's happy because she doesn't have to do what she normally has to do. I'm happy because everybody around sees an old white ship captain with a young local, and he's curious. He wants to know, how is your ship? What's going on? I hear your ship is almost out of food. What's wrong? Why can't you guys leave, et cetera, et cetera. Is there anything I can do to help? You can actually sometimes get the girls on board because some captains will allow the girls on board,

and those girls, of course, they traffic and information about ships with each other, and I can get them to tell me what they find out on board. I can also go on board under pretense as an inspector. I've done that. Go on board as a port state control inspector with some fake, legitimate-looking IDs. Also, I can pretend to be a buyer. Almost all of these ships are for sale at some level,

even the ones that are not being advertised for sale. The crew may not know, for example, that the owner has not arranged for a buyer to come on board. So I may come on board and say, I'm here to represent Trident shipping, and they want me to take a look at the ship before we buy it. But we're willing to pay all the crew. They're back wages as soon as we pay.

Boy, talk about get the crew's attention then. When they're four or five months behind and their children are dying of starvation back home, and a guy comes on board and says, I want to look at the ship and we'll pay all back wages as soon as we buy it. You will not believe how much cooperation you can get. Right. Oh, my gosh.

I didn't even think about that. They're really that many months behind on pay sometimes. That's terrible. Oh, that's very normal. When a ship owner decides to stop paying his debts, he stops paying the crew first. He knows the crew can't leave. Once a crewman leaves the ship, he will never get paid. He has to stay on board until somebody will assume the crew debt and pay the crew.

That's terrible. And if the crew gets put off in a foreign port, there is a good chance they will never go home. They'll die in that foreign port. I have seen that happen. Really? Because they just have no money and no way of getting back from whatever, Venezuela to the Philippines or wherever they're from? Exactly.

These countries have no fund like the United States does to bring people home. There was one fellow, a very nice fellow from Peru, who died in Port-au-Prince because he got sick. His family had no money for a doctor,

no money to send him home. The Romano was the name of the ship, and he had been put off the ship when the ship was seized, along with the rest of the crew. Half of them got home. He died. Some of the others,

I don't know what happened to them. But that's a very common problem. That's terrible. That's really awful to hear that kind of thing happening. It's so unfair and just so tragic. So you go in and out of the country by land, or do you go out with the ship when you take the ship out? I'm a little confused. So is it your crew that takes the ship, or do you go in and out some other way? I usually go in by airfare. That makes sense. So whether I go out with ship or not,

depends on the situation. Quite often, I do have to go with the ship, especially if we have a dicey situation and we're doing it in the middle of the night. If the ship is being done, towed out, then I don't necessarily have to go with a ship. Like the Maya Express, we had a tugboat come in and tow it out. So I reconned the situation and I monitored the situation from another vessel. But once the vessel was outside of the port, my job was pretty much over and it was beyond my control. So I did email for the Port of Prince Airport as fast as I could after the ship got out of port. Maya Express is the ship that was in Haiti? Correct. If you're flying in, are you worried at all that you're on a list that says, hey, the guy who stole this ship last time has just landed at the airport,

maybe put some extra guards over there or give people a little bit of a heads up over at the port, because this guy's not here on a guided tour. The real problem is going into the computer. That's what I don't like. You'll get caught when you try to go in and they see your name on the computer, and then they take you into the back room. So one time, for example, I went into Venezuela by ferry from Trinidad because I was afraid to fly in, and I knew that little port in Venezuela.

They didn't check people very carefully that were coming from Trinidad across the bay there because I was afraid that I was in the Venezuelan computer for that Patrick M extraction. Interesting. I'm assuming you get resumes thrown at you all the time, but what kind of people do you actually hire? Well, they're seamen.

They're licensed crewmen. The most important, of course, is the chief engineer, but they all must be licensed crewmen. I'm guessing that a lot of military types try to apply, but what you really need is somebody who can work on any ship, even if something is broken, maybe the lights don't work, problem solvers, with seafaring expertise as opposed to somebody who's just brave or shoots straight. Because you don't use violence, right?

You use cunning and guile. That's correct. I'm not excluding that. And in fact, in my Somali work, we did have military types involved. But as a general rule, I need people who are extremely, competent in their field, especially the chief engineer. He's the most important man in the entire team, including me. Nobody can replace a good chief engineer. What does that person do? It sounds like that probably in charge of making sure the boat actually works, which, yeah, that would be important

when you're sneaking a boat out of a port. Oh, it's not easy at all. It's nothing like starting a car, and there are many things. In fact, quite often I will take the chief engineer with me on my recon, on board because he needs to see what's going on in the engine room. He needs to see if there's some part that's missing that we're going to have to have. A chief engineer who can board a vessel that he doesn't know in the middle of the night, explore the engine room by flashlight, get the air valves open because these engines start with air,

get the compressors running to get the air pressure up, get the oil going to the heads, get the oil going to the valves, and then to start the engine and be sure enough that the engine is going to keep running, that we can then take axes and chop the lines because we don't pull the lines in, we chop them with axes. Once we've chopped the lines with axes, I need that engine to run and keep running

until we get 13 miles offshore. Wow. I've heard that you don't use very many Americans on your crew. What's the reason for that? Are you trying to hire locals who speak a local language or know their way around? No, the sad fact is, America has lost the ability to man large, ocean-going commercial vessels.

we have no more American-flagged fleet. I forget what the number is. There's like 12 American-flag cargo ships left in the world. This is a serious problem, not just in my business, also in the marine surveying business, where you need chief engineers and captains as marine surveyors in New Orleans, where the grain ships are very large.

These marine surveying firms in New Orleans are having a terrible time hiring Americans. They have to hire crewmen who are experienced and good-quality men but they have to come from foreign because we do not have a reserve of American mariners from which to draw. This is probably a stupid question,

but we have so many people who are retiring from the Navy, but I guess most of them are not actually running the ship itself, right? So that pool's not enough to draw from? Well, there are a lot of mariners on supply boats and tugboats and so on, but a commercial freighter of 50,000 tons whose engine runs at 100 RPM

is a completely different animal. And you cannot go from one to the other. You have to start as an oiler or a cadet on a large ship and work your way up year after year in that large ship environment. It is not the kind of machinery where you can go from one to the other. And that's the problem for me would be, not only does the man have to be a good chief engineer, and he has to be brave, too, to be willing to take the risk,

but he has to be the kind of chief engineer who can go on board a ship that he doesn't know and work in the dark and get it going. Yeah, that is kind of a heavy lift. How many guys do you need to take a ship? I assume it varies with the size of the vessel. Yes, let's say a 30,000-tonner will have a normal crew, say, 15 to 17.

I need about six to eight men to get her to a near port. If we're going to go a long way, I need a full crew. But generally, I'm going to go to the nearest safe port, say three or four days away. and for that I need a skeleton crew of at least six or eight guys. Wow. Okay. I assume these guys don't charge their normal day rate when they work for you. You'd probably sweeten it up a little bit, given the risk factor involved?

Oh yeah, they get paid very well. Let's say an engineer who would normally make $250 to $300 a day, I will pay $1,000. Yeah. Is this a young man's game? Because it sounds like, look, I'm 43. I've got two little kids. Granted, I'm useless to you. In fact, I'm useless in many ways.

but this is not the kind of thing I would ever want to sign up for. Maybe like 20 years ago, 10 years ago, this would have been right up my alley, regardless of skill set. But I'm curious what kind of guys go for this. The chief engineer is not going to be a young man. No. He's going to need many years of experience. And I would be suspicious of a chief engineer in his 20s.

How old are they usually? A good chief should be in his 50s. 50s? Oh, wow. Okay. 40s maybe. But that's why they always call the captain the old man, because captains are always old men. When I was a captain in my 30s, my 60-year-old chief engineer called me the old man.

But the other crew have to be young and strong. For example, your deck crew, you want men who can handle those lines. And if we have to, you want men who can keep up and run away if you have to run. Yeah. So I have not hired men that were not physically able to handle themselves.

How do you know that a ship is safe to use and has fuel? That's part of your recon, right? that you look at the gauges and make sure, do they usually just leave the vessel fueled up in port? Yeah, unless some crook has sold fuel off the vessel, and we've had that happen. Yeah, I was worried about that. Yeah, like, if they drain it and sell that, and then you're sitting there stuck. But normally you don't. There's no market for heavy bunker. So if the vessel uses heavy bunker, then that's all going to be all aboard. There's a market for diesel, and every ship has to use some diesel. You start your engines with diesel, then you switch over to heavy bunker. But there are no gauges.

is you have to actually sound the tanks with a sounding tape. But then again, if you're pretending to be a buyer, it's quite normal that you'll sound the tanks. If you're an inspector, you might come up with a reason that, for example, the ship's been accused of pollution and therefore you want to see what's in the tanks, etc. Generally, the crew itself is not very hostile or suspicious. With the crew and with the girls on shore and with everybody,

if you show up and they have no reason to suspect that you're not what you appear to be or what you claim to be. They're so busy. Everybody's so busy trying to make a living. They don't look further than that. You're an old drunk white man with his young Venezuelan girlfriend. You're interested in this ship.

You want to help out somehow. Of course, there's nothing unusual about that. How do you get food while you're on the ship? Is it just short enough where you don't really need to worry about that, these missions or these operations? Well, there's always going to be some food on board. Yeah? I don't even worry about that.

If we take a ship out and there's no food on board, we'll eat the lifeboat crackers. Yeah, that makes sense. I guess you could bring a couple power bars in your backpack. I mean, you're not on the ship for a long period of time, right? It's a couple of days at most. Oh, I don't know. This went in Greece. I went on board for a few days and ended up on the boat for, I think, six weeks.

What? Why? I was trapped. The captain had originally agreed to do what we wanted, but then he got cold feet, dropped anchor behind an island in Greece, and refused to move. and my client was the mortgagee. There was a stalemate between the mortgagee and the owner, and it was never actually resolved.

The captain finally got desperate and agreed to take the ship to Malta where we seized the ship in Malta. Wow. Six weeks, man. That's a lot of crackers. Oh, we had plenty of food. On a Filipino crew ship, you have a rice cooker that stays full all the time. We never went short of food on that job.

Now, there have been jobs where we did have to try to search around and try to find some food on board, and some of the cans were kind of old, but not on that shop. I mentioned earlier that you never used force, always guile and cunning. Are we talking about bribery? The guards are around the port, I assume, but are they also on the ship itself? Oh, I've had several cases where the guards were on the ship.

In one case, I had to bribe the guard to get off. I had to give him enough money where he could go join his family in the interior of the country and never have to worry about a guard job again because, you know, after all, he's going to be in trouble. Yeah. In the morning, when the ship is gone,

they're going to be looking for him. That was Venezuela, where you can disappear quite easily. There was another case where the guard was on board, and I actually had to hire a girl to give him some sleeping powder to knock him out. I delivered his body onto the dock, made sure he was still breathing steadily, and then we took the ship out. Oh, my gosh.

If the host country catches you doing this, that even gets you personally, but if they see the boat rolling out, they send the Coast Guard or warships out to get you? Or is it just kind of like, that things move in, we don't want to go chase it? How hard do they pursue you? You mentioned the Venezuela job

where you weren't sure if they were going to follow you with a helicopter. That's pretty aggressive. But is this often a business dispute or once you're moving that thing, they're over it? No. I don't think I've ever had that happen.

Okay. They very aggressively pursue it. Not only do they see potential money leaving, but also there's sometimes quite a bit of investment that each party has made, into the scam, and they see their investment disappearing. For example, on the Maya Express, the pirate who had it seized, my understanding was that he had over $100,000 invested into bribes and various expenses involved in holding the ship for those months. Wow. Okay, so yeah, this is

the Golden Goose is taking flight at that point. They're not going to let it go. Yikes. You mentioned that a full moon was a terrible night to take the boat. I assume that's a visibility thing. Is that what you're hinting at there? Exactly. So do you pick deliberately bad conditions? Is it the worst, the weather, the better? Absolutely. That time that I had that guard carried off the ship, the only way we could take off in the middle of the afternoon was because I knew that there was a huge thunderstorm coming. You could see it coming out of the southeast. And I timed everything for just before the thunderstorm hit. And the moment the thunderstorm hit was when we left. Well, they tried to chase us. In fact, they sent a warship from Santo Domingo.

which is about 25 miles away to chase us. But I knew that I had already reconned that warship and I knew they had very old radars like World War II open array radars, the kind that looked like fishing nets, if you remember those old radars. And I knew that radar would see nothing in a rainstorm because of rain clutter. And that's apparently what happened because they didn't catch us.

Wow, it seems like the best time to do this if you don't have a storm would be some sort of like national holiday or how's a Saturday night when everybody's kind of like maybe drinking on the job or not showing up to work or hungover from the night before? It seems like you're really timing this quite precisely. National holidays are good. Feast days are good. One time in Greece, I managed to get a ship out on Good Friday

because I knew that all the Coast Guard officers would be drunk. I knew they'd be drunk because I paid the agent to take them a case of whiskey and at the Coast Guard at the lookout office where they could see the ship's path. and it was on a Friday night of Greek Easter and so nobody noticed when the ship slipped out. Another time that ship in Mexico, I knew there was a disco right next to the port, and it's a very quiet place,

and I knew that starting the ship engine would alert the guards. There was no guard on board, but the guards were like not more than, say, 150 feet away. But what I did was I paid the disco to put their speakers out on the lawn. I didn't do it. I had a guy to it. And he was going to have a big party out And so at the moment they had the speakers turned up full blast, we started the engine and sneaked out. So if the speakers were to drown out the sounds of the engine, so any guards would have just had already lost their hearing to the mariachi music.

That's a good idea. I got to hand it to you. How do you get on the ship itself? If you go through the port, yeah, you can walk up the gangway, but that's knocking on the front door. Do you ever board the ship like other pirates do from the side or the rear? You can tell I know Jack Squad about ships. Yeah, I've boarded ships from the sea. side where you can't be seen, but there has to be a pilot ladder. You have to have cooperation with somebody on board to do that. I've never actually climbed up the anchor chain. People have done it.

I know thieves who have done it, but I myself have not ever climbed up an anchor chain. I haven't done it, but if I have to, I'll throw a padded grapple up on the side and then pull myself up, but I haven't had to do that. Wow. How much are the ships worth that you usually repossess? Is there a dollar value that you kind of work in between? I would say probably be no less than about 10 million. And of course, up to, like, for example, the super tanker in Venezuela, that would have been, we're talking many millions of dollars. Yeah. Yeah, I know I've done other episodes about shipping and some of these oil tankers, I don't know if this includes the cargo. I don't think it does, but they're worth like 80 plus million dollars sometimes. Oh,

yeah, certainly. Or more. This is the insured value. So that's like the insured value of a 30-year-old possibly not working as it once did, tanker, and that's still $80 million. So it's probably half of what it was worth when it was manufactured and nice and shiny. Take me through the first, I don't know, 10 or 15 minutes of a ship extraction mission. You sneak on the ship. What do you do once you're on there? What's the first thing that has to be done? The first thing is to go to the wheelhouse and ensure that you can get power to the ship.

At the same time, I go to the wheelhouse, the chief engineer takes the engine room gang to the engine room, and then the chief engineer and I start talking on the ship's internal communication to coordinate starting the engine, especially if there's going to be any sound that would be heard outside of the ship. We have to coordinate that. Even starting a generator could be noticed on the shore if the ship was dead ship to begin with. So at the same time, the deck crew are taking their axes forward and aft, and they're getting ready to chop the lines. The moment that the Chief Engineer has air up and can signal to me that he has enough air pressure to start the main engine, you never want to chop the lines until you got the main engine started.

Because if the main engine doesn't start, you might have a shot at it some other time. But once you've chopped the lines, there's no going back. So the moment the main engine starts, and you get the first few puffs of smoke out of the funnel, then I get on the horn and I tell the crews for and a half to chop the lines. then I've got a quartermaster who's on the wheel. I give the quartermaster his steering instructions to move the ship away from the dock and to steer for the fastest way to open water.

This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Captain Max Hardberger. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

You can ask the AI chatbot as well, that's on the website, thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Captain Max Hardberger. You're chopping the lines with an axe. So do they still use ropes? They don't use chains for this? I'm talking about the dock lines that secure the ship to the dock. Yeah.

You always use ropes. Two and a half inch diameter ropes. Wow, that's it, huh? For some reason, I envision these just absolutely massive steel chains, but I guess you have to move them by hand so that wouldn't work, right? Well, you have a bunch of them. you'll probably have eight to 10 dock lines. So, yeah, two and a half inch diameter line has a lot of strength.

Yeah, no kidding. Now it all makes sense that they use an axe. What happens if you get on the ship and the engine won't start? You mentioned that you might have another shot at it. Do you mean, okay, this thing won't start. We need a widget. Everybody sneak back off this thing, and we're going to go get the widget and come back in three days.

Is that what we're talking about? Well, that would be the best thing to do in that case. The worst thing is you have to jump over the side. and swim away. My God. That sounds awful in a port, too, with gear, right? I mean, you'd have to ditch some of that or stash it somewhere. Jumping off of a boat that big in a port in the dark sounds kind of horrifying.

Oh, I've been faced with it. Oh, my gosh. In Venezuela or wherever, none of these places are places you want to be in prison. That's for sure. If you need a part, though, how do you get the part? How does that even work? You're in Haiti. Oh, hey, we need a very specialized thing.

for a diesel boat manufactured in Germany. How could you get that? Somebody's got to fly it in for you, yeah? Yeah, I'll get a guy in Germany to get on the plane with it and fly it to me. Oh, my gosh. And they just landed a small airport in Port-Prince or whatever near Port-Prince Haiti

and drop off the, I don't know, I don't even know any ship parts that aren't the giant wheel that they probably don't use anymore. Some engine part, your guy has to install that on the fly, too, no doubt. That case in Trinidad, the pirate shipyard,

they had taken off the air start valve off the main engine because they were afraid that somebody might do exactly what I was thinking of doing. Okay. But on my inspection, that's what I was looking for. And when I saw the air start valve missing, which is about a foot by a foot, and it sits on the front of the engine,

when I saw it missing, I had my chief engineer, he was actually in Germany. Peter Schick was his name. He's dead now. And I had him go to the manufacturer, get the air start from Verkspur, actually in Holland. get it and then send it to Miami and then a guy in Miami flew it down to me in Trinidad

and then I took it on board my Confederate took the ship out. Wow. And so you really do need an amazing engineer who can sit there and go, all right, we've got a very limited amount of time. You need to put this piece in, make sure it works, start the engine and oh, by the way, there's no working lights down there

so you're going to have a headlamp or whatever during the time you're doing this. Every minute that goes by is time. that the authorities might catch on to what we're doing or the guard might have a change of heart. This is stressful. It's stressful even thinking about this kind of thing. Yeah, it's stressful.

The ship you took out of Haiti, this was not the most calm time to go for, well, Haiti seems like a wild place anyway, but this was not the most chill time to be in the country. Tell me about that. Haiti was actually in the middle of the revolution at the moment, and the Aristide had fled. And I know Haiti quite well.

I have Godchildren in Haiti. I own property in Haiti, and I spent many a year there. Policemen in Haiti are very, shall we say, attuned to self-preservation. The moment that social order breaks down, they tear off their uniforms and run up in the hills. And so at that time, all the police stations were deserted. There were no police to be found. In fact, interestingly enough, in Miraguan, which is a little port, where that ship was being hid, the port authority actually hired some men and gave them uniforms because they knew that

foreign ships were not going to come into a port with no police. Wow. So the mayor hired some men to be policemen and walk around in uniforms to reassure the foreign crews that everything was okay. And these are just Joe Schmoe wearing a police uniform, not actually police. Wow. Fake police. Right. When we landed to go to the ship and when we went from Porte Prince to Mariguan, there's about five or six towns on the way, every police station had been burned out. The police cars were turned over and burned out. All the roads were full of bandits at the time. And in Haiti, it's very easy to be a road bandit because all you got to do is roll some rocks in

the road. And the terrain is so rugged that there's no chance of going around. You have to stay on the road. So when the car stops at the rocks, you shoot the occupants and take whatever they have. Oh, my God. In fact, it's even worse now today than it was then, unfortunately. But when we got to Miraguay and I found out the situation with the ship, the only only, the owner had a couple of guards who were on board. They had been selling fuel off the ship to all comers.

So I had my Haitian tell them that was going to bring a tugboat to buy fuel, the tugboat that was going to tow it off, of course. And they were happy with that. And then I hired a couple of SWAT team guys from Porter Prince to come down and control the crowd, because I knew there was going to be a big crowd while we were trying to cut the anchor chain. We had to cut the anchor chains with the torch. I thought it was going to take about 15 minutes, and it took half an hour. and of course people come fleeing down. Oh, that was the time where there was only one cell phone in the entire town that worked.

It was up on a soccer pitch on the top of a hill. So that's the time I hired a witch doctor to go and put a curse on that soccer field so the port director who had the cell phone wouldn't go up there and call Porta Prince to report it. And in fact, my client, the mortgagee, loved to show his friends a line item and his bill $100 for the services of one witch doctor.

So you hire a witch doctor And what just made sure that everybody around knew That there was a witch doctor on the soccer field And they were like, I'm not going near that thing I don't care what you tell me I'm not going out there with this cell phone That place is cursed That's brilliant

You didn't have to bribe anybody You didn't have to threaten anybody You just had to have some I don't know dried chicken heads Spread around the place or whatever And that was it Well I'd hired that same guy 20 years earlier To come on my ship when I was a ship captain

And put the powder on my ship to keep the thieves off. And the interesting thing about it was he, in 20 years, he hadn't aged a bit. And maybe he's on to something. I think so. Whatever's in that powder, those chicken heads, man. I guess then witchcraft is something that just everybody universally believes in down there? That's correct. Wow. In 2004, Aristide flees, the president of Haiti flees. I know some French foreign Legion guys that actually got him out of there. And if memory serves, didn't they empty all the prisons? Or somebody emptied all the prison. They just went to the National Penitentiary and just opened all the doors, let all the gangsters out.

Probably what, to distract the police slash let their friends out? Is that the idea behind that? It's been so long. Yeah, to let their friends and relatives out, surely. The National Penitentiary normally holds about 1,500, 2,000 prisoners, and they were all released. Not on that, but all the jails all throughout the country were all opened. I can't imagine you said you lived in Haiti. What is that even like? It's just got to... be so incredibly wild. Normally it's not. Normally it's very peaceful and the Haitians are wonderful, peaceful, happy, joyous people. The history of Haiti is a complicated one and the responsibilities for the Haitian situation must be born by more than just the Haitians. Yeah, I'm with you on that.

I mean, it's got a colonial and slavery background and slavery uprising, corruption. I mean, it's just quite tragic is the understatement of the show here that it's so tragic. But you living there, what brought you there? You're just curious and adventurous, or did you meet somebody that you love down there? I mean, what brings you to a place like that and you say, I want to live here? I want to buy a house here. No, no, I was a ship captain. My owner got a two-year contract to carry rice from Freeport, Texas, to Haiti, to Miraguan, that same little town. My first time in Miraguan was when my ship arrived, I think 84 that would have been. And then, of course, I just met people and became friends. And then later I had a shipbreaking operation in

Mariguan and hired, I had 100 Haitians working for me. That's when I bought some property. Is shipbreaking what it sounds like? Is that just a salvaging old boats? Is that what that means? Yeah, that's right. Cutting up ships. I've seen those videos where they blare the horn and they run the thing up on the beach as fast as they can and then all these, I guess, maybe it's in Bangladesh and all these guys are running around and it was mystifying until somebody told me that that's how they get the boat on shore and then take it apart. Yeah, we didn't have to do that. We have deep water in my property where we can just come alongside by side and then cut the ship up alongside. But that's how they do it where you don't have a dock where you have to run the ship up onto the beach.

So during the earthquake and all these other tragedies, are you worried about your people, I assume, but you're also worried about your business down there, right? Do you have people protecting it while you're not there? No, no, my property is unimproved. I see. There was no worry about that. It's just, my property is just some bare coral ground next to the port of Miraguan. I see. Okay. Wow. You've got a lot of tricks up your sleeve, man. I heard you once told a guard or had someone tell a guard, his mother had a heart attack, and he just runs off the boat, which I think is also quite genius. What jobs have you turned down? The submarine job sounds like it didn't work out. What other jobs have you said, no thank you? This sounds way too dangerous.

Well, there was that one ferry in Venezuela. We didn't turn the job down. We advised the client that it was impractical. It would be too dangerous. Which one was this? That was the ferry where I was afraid that they would chase it with helicopters. Ah, that was a ferry. Okay, gotcha, yeah.

There was another ship in Puntafiho, Venezuela, where the claim of damaged cargo, and I got to Puntafiho, I found that the cargo actually had been damaged. In fact, the cargo was still at the port, and it was a cargo of pulp. And the pulp had gotten wet, and on the ship. ship and was damaged, and so we turned that job down because it was a legitimate claim. I see. Other than that, I don't remember exactly how many. We haven't turned that many down, I'm happy to say.

Tell me about the Vladivostok incident. Yeah, that was fun. That was when the lady I went with got into a fist fight with her translator in front of the office of the guy we were there to buy ships from. He grabbed her by the throat and was shaking her. He was throttling her by. the throat. And the moment that this tall, dignified Russian guy opened the door, she kicked in between the legs. He howled like a monkey. Then they saw the Russian, and they both straightened up, assumed dignified expressions, and the three of us marched into his office with him going, what? He was from Bulgaria. She called him the translator. He turned out to be our enemy. He turned

us over to the Russian mafia to be captured. She called him the Bulgarian. Wow, wait a minute. So, okay, so you went there to buy ships from this guy, and how did it go so wrong? And I don't just mean the getting kicked in the nuts into the fist fight. I mean, that's, I definitely want to hear a little bit more about that. But how does an operation degrade to that level? Well, what we didn't know and what we found out was that Vladivostok had been taken over by the Russian mafia. And in fact, the week before we got there, the assistant port director had been shot dead, apparently because he refused to go along with it.

What happened was the mafia found out that we were there to buy scrap ships. I was there to buy them for a Chinese buyer, and we were going to take them from Vladivostok to China for scrapping. There was a large 3,000-ton deadweight fish processing vessels, a whole bunch of them. But when the mafia found out that we were there to buy, their plan was to capture me and have me call Dr. Yin, that was my client, and tell him to come to Vladivostok with a bunch of cash. And then if I didn't, of course, they would beat me

or whatever they had to do to force me to call him and tell him to come. So I knew they were looking for me. In fact, when we got back to the hotel, the receptionist who was a quite friendly lady, told us that these guys, she called them musicians. That's the Russian word, mafia. They had been there looking for us. But she put us on a floor that was not open to foreigners

so they couldn't find us. And then we sneaked out of town the next morning. Wow, it was pretty lucky that she did that for you because do you think she put herself a little bit at risk helping you? She has to live there. I don't know, because when we left, nothing had happened. So I don't know. But this guy had stolen our visas.

We were stuck. And we knew that he had stolen our visas because when he left with this mafia guy, he held up our two visas, their yellow cards, and gave me a big grin and waved with his fingers at me to show that he had stolen our visas. So we had a real hassle that evening of getting replacement visas

so that we could leave the next morning. Obviously, the interpreter just, do you think he planned that all along? Or do you think he just smelled the money and decided to call his friend's cousin? Andre was the mafia guy. And I could tell they were getting to be buddies. What year was this? This was about two weeks after Vladivostok was open to foreigners. Before that, foreigners were not allowed in the city.

Oh, really? So this was about two weeks after Vladivostok was open to foreigners. Oh, wow. This would have been about 93 or so. Why was it closed to foreigners? Because there's a port there. Was there a submarine base there or something like that, a naval base? A large naval base.

Russia's only naval base on the Pacific. I had a job that I didn't take in Vladivostok, and it would have been in 2003. And it sounds like it would have been really interesting, but possibly I made the right choice, I think. Take your food with you. Really? No good food there?

I mean, they've got to have, maybe it's a little better now. No? I hope it's better now. It was horrible then. Yeah, man. Stuff like that is just so fascinating. Places like that are super interesting. Obviously, getting kidnapped by the Russian mafia is less interesting.

Or maybe it's very interesting, but for all the wrong reasons. So you never got those ships for your Chinese buyer, I assume? Nope, nope. That deal completely fell through. Would you go back to Russia? Those guys surely have forgotten you by now. Oh, yeah. I have no problems going back to Russia.

Wow. I'm sure you do this mostly to make a living, but is there any part of you that gets a kick out of recovering a ship from thieves who stole it in the first place? Yeah, I like the fact that the bad guy has got their comeuppance. Gives me a great deal of satisfaction.

I loved it when the guy who tried to steal the Maya Express showed up to the Bahamas, which is a very friendly jurisdiction for Margot G's. And the thief showed up to claim that we had stolen his ship and to try to get it back. the judge told him, and this is in the record, that you're lucky, I don't have you put in jail right here right now. And I was happy about that. And my client was quite happy.

Yeah, that's a relief. Hearing things like this and you doing the job that you do, when you get back to the United States, you must just be thinking, I'm glad I live in this very imperfect place that has rule of law, where I have recourse other than bribing a judge. I can make money honestly rather than stealing from other people. it really puts things into stark contrast. Yeah, many times I have, when my friends and neighbors and my wife, when I was married, when they would complain about the dryer not working or complain about the dishwasher being on the fritz, I would have to hold my tongue. Yeah, especially after living in a place like Haiti and saying, though the Wi-Fi's too slow?

Is that the problem today? Yeah, it's very, again, stark contrast. You're a very interesting guy. You've been a lawyer, you still are a lawyer. What else? Pilot, crop duster, private investigator, I don't know the technical term for this dead body transporter. I assume there's a better way to phrase that.

Yeah, I flew for a mortuary service. Yeah. I flew bodies around. A stunt man? Yeah, yeah. I'm guessing you don't do that anymore. I haven't been called on to do it in a long time. But my stunt boss and I are still good buddies.

And in fact, we might be going out to Arizona sometime in the fall for a movie. Wow. You see, the thing about it is that it's very hard for it. A young man cannot double for an old man. So if you have an actor

who is an old man, his stunt double has to be an old man. The audience can actually see the difference. There is actually work for physically capable old stunt doubles.

I heard that in the latest Indiana Jones, they wanted to get him a stunt double and Harrison Ford said, man, I'm old. I want people to see me hunched over while I'm riding a horse

because I'm 75 or however old he is. And that's admirable, but also he's lucky he didn't get thrown off that horse. Yep, yep. What do you want to do when you retire? You were an English teacher. Might go back to that? No, I don't think so.

No. I'm not interested in going back to teaching. Let me guess it's too dangerous? It's too frustrating, and it's too rule-bound. It would be possible if I had a classroom without rules where I didn't have to turn in lesson plans. That was one thing I never did was turn in lesson plans. It's against my religion.

And luckily, principals, after a few weeks, principals realize there's no hope and they give up asking for them. But I doubt if I'll go back to teaching. I don't know, I'm playing drums in a blues band now. I might keep doing that. This sounds like something that should be made into a movie. I know that was an idea early on.

Is that still happening? After 15 years, 14 years, something like that. Yeah, yeah, there are people who are still working on it. Michael Bono stays on top of that. And I myself don't follow it. Michael's your business partner in the ship repo business. I see. Correct. Never a dull day in the office.

Hey, Max? Maybe in the office it's a dull day, but I don't get to stay in the office much. I really appreciate it. This is a long time in the making, crazy interesting, and I hope you stay safe, and we'll see you either in a movie or an English classroom sometime in the future. Yeah, and let's hope not in the news. Yeah, exactly. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that,

here's what you can check out next on the Jordan Harbinger show. You're in Somalia trying to track down pirate gangs, and I love to kind of hear what this felt like. We went with a big security team, and we paid a security team in a lot of money, and it was this one portion of a clan in Central Somalia that was supposed to protect us. So how did they get you?

My partner, Ashwin, flew off to Mogadishu. I drove him to the airport and then we saw him off. He got on the plane safely. And then on the way back from the airport, back into town towards our hotel, there was actually a truck waiting for us. It was a truck with a cannon welded in the back. These are very common trucks. They're called technicals.

At first we thought it was there to watch over us or protect us or something. But actually it stopped our car and 12 gunmen from the flatbed came over to my side of the car. And they actually fired in the air and then opened the door and tore me out of the car. They were waiting for me, and they were probably waiting or hoping for both of us. I think they were a little bit disappointed that there was only one journalist. They beat me. They broke my glasses, and I was wearing glasses at the time, and they had another car waiting, and they bundled me into it,

and off we drove into the bush. For about three hours, something like that. Hard to keep track of time, but at some point we stopped. They blindfolded me, and they took me a few steps over to a mattress. So there was a mattress waiting for me in the middle of nowhere. There were other people there, other guards and other hostages, and I sat down for the next two years and eight months. I was a hostage. For more on life and captivity under the thumb of Somali pirates and how he made it out,

check out episode 115 with Michael Scott Moore here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. As one would predict, Captain Max lives on a sailboat, so how appropriate is that? He also spends a lot of time in Haiti and owns property there. The man loves to read. He had 8,000 books that he lost to. Hurricane Katrina. That's horrible. Sorry to hear that. The other apps we mentioned in this particular conversation, Ian Urbina, Episode 856, Matthew Campbell, episode 739 about shipping, Michael Scott Moore, episode 115. He was kidnapped by Somali pirates. A lot of drama and action on the high seas.

We'll link to those episodes in the show notes as well. And all things, Max Hardberger, will be in the show notes over at Jordan Harbinger.com. You can also ask the AI chatbot, which is on the website, transcripts are in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support this show always at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We've also got the newsletter. And every week, the team and I dig into an older episode of the show and dissect the lessons from it.

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