BOOK REVIEW: Dead in the Water (A True Story of Hijacking, Murder and a Global Maritime Conspiracy)By Mathew Campbell and Kit Chellel. Portfolio/Penguin, New York, hard cover, 268 pp with index and bibliographical references. US$27
On the night of July 5, 2011, a 271-meter-long oil tanker carrying 150,000 tonnes of crude worth US$100 million from Ukraine to China stopped dead in the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden to take on what purportedly were guards to protect the ship on its trip through one of the world’s most hazardous shipping lanes. That the 20-year-old MT Brilliante Virtuoso, built in 1991, was on its fourth name and a raft of different owners, formerly having been named the St. Romauld, then the Nandu, then the Stainless, before becoming the Brilliante Virtuoso in 2008, should have given off danger signals. Now Greek-owned, in 2011 the ship was registered in the Marshall Islands and flagged as Liberian. Or it could have been flagged in any variety of other countries to dodge safety regulations and labor protections for the crew. As Bloomberg reporters Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel write, the half dozen “guards” seeking permission to come ashore weren’t guards, but neither were they Somali pirates who at the time were terrorizing ship crews along the Horn of Africa. They allegedly had been hired in apparent collusion with the captain of the ship and the chief engineer by the beneficial owner of the Brilliante Virtuoso, a financially troubled Greek tycoon named Marios Illiopoulos, to shoot up the ship, blow up the engine room and terrorize the 26-man Filipino crew and render the ship ready for salvage in an insurance scam with the help of an eager salvage crew anxious to take part in the scam. As Campbell and Chellel write, the people who set out to prove insurance fraud ran into a hall of mirrors in which nothing was as it seemed. It was also a story that happens far too often on the high seas, where the primary goal of even the most reputable ship owners seems to be to operate outside reach of the land-based rule of law. Especially since the global economy and the shipping industry were disrupted by the global Covid-19 coronavirus crisis, hundreds of ships and thousands of crews have been abandoned all over the planet… The text above is just an excerpt from this subscriber-only story.To read the whole thing and get full access to Asia Sentinel's reporting and archives, subscribe now for US$10/month or US$100/year.This article is among the stories we choose to make widely available.If you wish to get the full Asia Sentinel experience and access more exclusive content, please do subscribe to us for US$10/month or US$100/year.
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BOOK REVIEW: Dead in the Water (A True Story of Hijacking, Murder and a Global Maritime Conspiracy)
March 31, 2023
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