The first thing the agents ask for is the captain. Sevilla indicates the shipmaster Zavaleta Salas, who points back at the fishing captain Sevilla. But the Spanish fishing captain speaks English and he has the crew list, which states that Zavaleta Salas is the Kunlun’s captain – and on paper, responsible for the ship. When the agents ask Zavaleta Salas for his name, address and telephone number, he reluctantly obeys. What he has feared throughout the entire voyage is now in the process of happening. Everything is rigged to make him the scapegoat, the one to be sacrificed so the fishing captain Sevilla and the others will be spared taking responsibility for the ship’s catalogue of sins.
On the mere suspicion of pirate activity, slave traffic, illegal broadcasting, statelessness or that the ship is from their own country, the Australian agents could force their way on board.1 Now they finally had a pretext. The authorities of Equatorial Guinea have confirmed that the Kunlun is not flagged in the country. The Kunlun is probably sailing under a false flag. In order to check whether or not the ship is stateless, they must inspect all the papers and find the owner.
Arresting the ship and forcing it to land in Australia is not an option, since the Kunlun has not been fishing in Australian waters and there are no Australian citizens on the ship.
The customs agents have been instructed to document the cargo, acquire the ship’s documents and search for emails, telephone numbers and scraps of paper with names and addresses. On the bridge they find the telephone numbers of several members of the Vidal syndicate in Galicia, emails containing messages from the ship owner, receipts, illegal gillnets and data documenting the catch and where it was from.
They also make another surprising find. The Kunlun has been monitoring the movements of Australia’s large research ship, the Aurora Australis. The only thing they can’t find is the documents proving that the ship has two identities.
After the raid the Kunlun is permitted to sail on. For the bird of ill omen, Alberto Zavaleta Salas, the adversity feels endless. When he receives the order to set his course for Phuket in Thailand, he has the feeling that he is headed for his own downfall.
For almost 20 years the Australian authorities have been trying to stop the pirate fleet, but that it was the pirates’ arrogance that would prove to be their greatest vulnerability was something Glen Salmon, the man in charge of the work, had not anticipated. Formerly the pirate fleet sailed under real flags and with genuine documents. Now they evidently used their imagination and forged documents to pretend they had all the formalities in order. They believed they were untouchable, Salmon thinks.
When Salmon starts going through the materials confiscated on board, he is able to piece together large segments of the mission the Kunlun has been on, as well as who has been giving the ship its orders.
He burns the evidence onto 17 DVDs and sends them to the authorities in Spain and to “Operation Spillway”.
On the Bob Barker Peter Hammarstedt starts the day by describing the drama that took place west of the Cocos Islands.
“No word yet as to whether there will be an arrest. The Kunlun must have headed home after the Sam Simon left them. Must have been a very bad season for them,” he says to applause from the crew.
When he comes up onto the bridge and studies the Thunder through his binoculars, he becomes convinced that the news about the boarding has reached the ship. All the fishing gear has been removed from the deck.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they are destroying evidence and that it is an indication of their being ready to head home,” he says on the bridge.
The jubilation of the morning meeting evaporates when the crew hears that the Kunlun has been allowed to continue sailing. First mate Adam Meyerson leans over the map table and shakes his head in despair over the Australian authorities.
“Wow! Those guys are pretty weak.”2
26
OPERATION SPARROW
RIBEIRA, MARCH 2015
They react with the speed of lightning. First they lock the door. Then they turn off the light. Subsequently they start up the paper shredder.
Three fisheries officers are standing beneath the colonnade by Vidal Armadore’s offices in Ribeira. They have in their hands a search warrant, but nonetheless announce their arrival by ringing the doorbell. The moment that environmentalists and the authorities of several countries have for years been waiting for is about to culminate in a clumsy anti-climax. Operation Sparrow, named after Johnny Depp’s unpredictable character in Pirates of the Caribbean, was supposed to be a unique operation in a European context. For the first time, the secret owners of “The Bandit 6” were to be flushed out into the light of day.
Now the officers are standing and staring irresolutely at a closed door. Then they call the local police station and request assistance. Fifteen minutes after ringing the bell, they are finally inside the room where the paper shredder is in the process of cutting to ribbons the evidence of 20 years of illegal fishing in Antarctica. The first thing the fisheries officers do is to turn off the shredder. Amongst the strips of paper, they see the remains of documents from 2012. In a tiny storeroom deep inside the premises, they find several boxes of documents that somebody has obviously attempted to hide.
One of the three individuals frantically at work inside the shipping company premises is Serafin Vidal, the man who hired Alberto Zavaleta Salas as captain of the Kunlun and who is responsible for recruiting crew members for the fleet that has been plundering toothfish stocks in the Southern Ocean. Soon Manuel Antonio “Toño” Vidal Pego also come rushing in. “Toño”, the family’s business mind, who has a predilection for luxury apartments, expensive restaurants and fast cars, sits down and writes 50 pages of comments on the documents that
