Much like Andalusia, the region is accused of being a wilful laggard, but without the mitigating climate of the south. Galicia is damp, green and hilly, a Spanish Scotland with a rugged and isolated rocky coastline – a landscape that is especially attractive if you are a cocaine smuggler.
A significant portion of the cocaine that comes to Europe is brought to land by boats along the coast of Galicia. But although the cocaine gangs in Galicia are notorious for their efficiency and brutality, the term mafia gallega is reserved for the fishermen.
And if there is a godfather to be found among the “mafia fishermen”, it is “Tucho” – Antonio Vidal Suárez, head of the family and majority shareholder of both the shipping company Vidal Armadores and a conglomerate of companies. In Ribeira he is a legend. The only thing he has ever said to the press is: “Go to hell.”
Ribeira is located on the western side of the Barbanza peninsula, below a heather-covered hill and facing the Atlantic Ocean. The city lacks the charm of a Spanish small town, and the hotels are few and inhospitable. But there is plenty of available parking.
“Fuck.”
That is all that is written on the facade of the dive closest to the harbour. Inside, beneath the faded pin-up photographs, the fishermen, the buyers and the pensioners gather to hear the news about the fishing.
“We always get the blame. The entire world points their finger at us. We are proper seamen and run an organized and legal fishing enterprise. Look at those bloody Chinese. Nobody cares about the unpainted hulks they poach from,” says one of the fish merchants in the bar without a name.
A middle aged man, he says he is a retired pizza baker, asks us to go outside the bar with him to talk.
“The network of ship owners is so strong and tight-knit that nobody dares tell the truth. Whoever gabs about pirate fishing will be unemployed forever. Or beaten up,” he explains.
He lights a cigarette and pulls us even further away from the entrance to be sure that nobody can hear him.
“There are also those who dislike that the pirate ship owners have given Ribeira a bad reputation, but for many people they are role models. They are admired for being brave, wealthy, not paying taxes and always getting away,” he continues.
Then the silence of the evening in Ribeira is broken by a high-pitched alarm. As it blasts through the moisture-corroded walls of the stone buildings, the men abandon their half-empty glasses, rush out of the dives around the harbour into the darkness and down to the fish market. It is the signal that a ship has arrived at the quay and the catch will be auctioned off.
Three different ship owners are identified as possible owners of the Thunder. Many point the finger at the notorious pirate shipping company Vidal Armadores. At the company’s main office in Ribeira, an unassuming concrete building a few streets up from the harbour, the receptionist denies knowing anything at all about the company. Or the management.
More than 20 years have passed since the Vidal family first heard the rumours of the fortune hidden in the depths off the coast of Antarctica. Since then the family’s ships have been fined, seized and chased without this bringing their appetite for toothfish to an end.
When the American authorities issued a wanted notice through Interpol for the family’s oldest son and sharpest business mind, Manuel Antonio Vidal Pego, for the import of 26 tons of poached toothfish, he appeared in a court in Miami and accepted a fine of USD 400,000 to avoid imprisonment. He also made a solemn vow to stay away from illegal fishing in the future. It was a promise he would never keep. Instead he moved the pirate fleet to countries like Equatorial Guinea, North Korea and Sierra Leone – states that have not adopted the international conventions regulating fishing in the oceans of the world. The ships were owned by companies in tax havens such as Panama, while the profits were funnelled back to Galicia, where the family invested in a fish oil factory, real estate and windmills. From Brussels, Madrid and the provincial government of Santiago de Compostela, the family received EUR 10 million in subsidies – to the accompaniment of loud complaints from the green movement.3
The family itself holds a low profile. In 2011, Manuel Antonio Vidal Pego gave his first interview and started by pointing out that he had neither a wooden leg nor a parrot on his shoulder, and that he was out of the toothfish business.4 At that time the family business had already been linked to 40 cases of illegal fishing.
At the Vidal family’s luxury villa, which is situated on a well-groomed and securely fenced-in property on a hill overlooking Ribeira, neither is there anyone who opens the door.
We return to the harbour. It is midday and there is little activity. An Indonesian crew is playing football at the far end of one of the jetties. The only sign of Vidal in the harbour is a small fish-landing facility and a trawler bearing the logo of the company Hijos de Vidal Bandín, which in 2012 was sentenced to pay a fine of GBP 1.6 million due to overfishing that a British judge referred to as “systematic”, “repeated” and “cynical”.5
A middle-aged man is carrying crates of fish from the vessel. It is José Vidal Suárez, brother of the powerful “Tucho”.
“I’m not going to say anything I shouldn’t say. Everyone has problems and each of us must sweep before our own door. I don’t meddle in other people’s lives,” he says curtly.
“Where can I find your brother?”
“I don’t know anything,” he answers and disappears inside the fish market.
The bar Doble SS situated by the harbour is full of hollering, cheering and, here and there, despairing men. On the flat
