Several of the Thunder’s officers know that the ship was wanted by Interpol, but how much does the young public prosecutor know about them? The local defence attorney hired by the ship agent Morais tries to reassure them, first with a yellow fever vaccine, then cautious optimism.
“Everyone will be able to travel home soon,” he says.
For three of the officers of the Thunder life will soon turn pitch-dark.
40
THREE CONDEMNED MEN
SÃO TOMÉ AND PRÍNCIPE, APRIL 2015
Five days after the wreck of the Thunder, three Interpol agents land in São Tomé. The team is led by the energetic Portuguese agent Mario, who has followed the voyage of the Thunder from the moment the ship was found until it sank. With him from Lyon he has a specialist in human trafficking and from Lisbon a policewoman who speaks fluent Indonesian.
The agents are not authorized to wave hand guns around, interrogate suspects or force anyone into handcuffs. They don’t arrest people, don’t operate prisons, don’t own the intelligence information they collect and cannot make statements on behalf of the member countries. When an Interpol agent appears at a crime scene, he is there to assist the local police.
Interpol’s Project Scale will for the first time assist a nation in bringing up criminal charges against fishing pirates.
After having informed himself of the details of the local investigation, the Interpol agent sees that just about everything has been done incorrectly. The interrogations of the Thunder crew are superficial; the police have asked the deck crew, chief engineer and captain all the same simple questions. In several of the interrogations the suspect’s country of origin was not even established. But what really puzzles him is the arrangement of the furniture in the interview room. Where the suspect is supposed to sit, there is a tall chair. Where the policeman is supposed to sit, there is a lower chair. It’s almost as if the crew of the Thunder are being treated like celebrity guests, not like suspects in a criminal case, they think.
In the subsequent interrogations, the crew and officers will be gathered in a big room and nobody is to know who will be interrogated or when. When an interrogation is finished, the suspect is to be led out of the building without having the possibility to speak with those who are still waiting.
The public prosecutor Nobre de Carvalho witnesses how the Interpol team first goes to work on the furnishings. Pictures and other removable objects on the walls that can be used as a weapon are taken down. The Indonesians are to be interviewed as witnesses and the room and the atmosphere is to be pleasant and relaxing. With the officers, it will be different. They are suspects and the atmosphere in the room must be serious and oppressive. They will sit on hard, low chairs. And between the suspect and head of interrogation there will be a solid table that is wide enough to prevent the suspect from throwing a punch.
They start by interviewing the Indonesian crew. Both Sea Shepherd and an expert in human trafficking from the University of Auckland have alleged that the crew may be victims of involuntary servitude. Although the Interpol team doesn’t believe the allegations, they must be checked out. A ship owner who wants a crew to sail to the most remote and dangerous maritime regions on the planet wants loyal seamen he can trust, capable and experienced men who know how to work effectively in the inhospitable climate of Antarctica, Mario thinks.
In the course of the interviews it becomes clear that the Indonesians are not victims of human trafficking. They have received wages, they have posted messages on Facebook, and they have communicated with their families in Indonesia. The Interpol investigators find no evidence of the Indonesian crew having been subjected to any criminal violations.
When the fishing captain Juan Manuel Patiño Lampon enters the interrogation room, he is wearing reading glasses, shorts, flip-flops and a T-shirt.
This is the moment the investigators have been looking forward to.
Lampon is tall, corpulent and has beard stubble. His facial expression is impenetrable and his gaze is so full of rage that the investigators believe he will soon break down and cry. Lampon sits down on the edge of his chair, as if he is preparing to make a quick exit or for a tussle. When he is offered a bottle of water, he declines with a hand movement.
Sixty-one-year-old Juan Manuel Patiño Lampon has been shaped by more than 40 years at sea; he is a proud and uncompromising fisherman and the Thunder’s alpha male. It is the man who wears his watch on his right wrist, the way “the Balaclava man” did, and who in the course of four months has not said anything but “puta mierda” – bloody cunt – to Sea Shepherd. He was the man who made the important decisions and decided where they would sail and fish.
First, the investigators will compliment Lampon on the gillnets he has constructed. When Mario met the Sea Shepherd ship the Sam Simon in Mauritius a mere two months before, he studied the nets Lampon deployed in the Banzare Bank. He was impressed with the construction and knows that the Thunder’s fishing captain is a master of the craft. The best fishing captains leave their signature on the 15–20 kilometre-long nets, which are spliced together to catch as many fish as possible and simultaneously to make them easy for the crew to handle. For a fisheries investigator, the net construction can tell him just as much about the perpetrator as DNA on a bloodstained carpet can tell a homicide investigator.
After having warmed Lampon up with the compliment, they will get him to admit that he has been fishing illegally. That is the strategy.
Before each interrogation of the officers, Mario has prepared 40 questions, depending upon the kind of role the
