Professor Denzil Miller is called an Antarctic legend. He has led 15 scientific expeditions to the continent, and for eight years he was the Executive Secretary of CCAMLR.
“This is not about catching some fish. It is world-wide, organized crime. If we are going to stop them, we must be far more serious about following the money trail, where the money goes and what it is spent on. I have suggested that we establish ‘red cells’ with our own intelligence officers who operate completely under the radar and outside the system and who have the freedom to access tax registries and bank accounts. When it comes to crime as sophisticated as this, personal liberty does not exist. We must clean up one area at a time, chase them from place to place, stop them, harass them and investigate them. The ship owners all operate according to a simple principle: the possibility of being caught and punished is so small that it’s worth the risk. And usually you can buy your way out of the problems,” Miller says.
“There’s no difference between stealing somebody’s food and killing them. The consequence is the same, it’s just a different kind of action. With one you kill a little more slowly than the other. There is therefore no reason to respect Vidal and the other ship owners as risk-takers. They are bandits. Illegal fishing is a way of breaking down moral and social structures. At the same time, it discloses people’s unfathomable greed.”
After a toothfish poaching vessel sank off the coast of South Georgia with 17 casualties, the autopsy report showed that most of the crew were either HIV-positive or had hepatitis.
“They were the poorest of the poor. A few years later the casualties from the wreck of the Amur were dumped on land near a landfill in Mauritius. That shows what kind of people are behind these operations,” Miller says.
When the pirate skip the Amur sailed out of port in Montevideo in September 2000, it already had a death sentence. The ship was in terrible shape, the crew barely had any experience as fishermen. Off the coast of the Kerguelen Islands the ship sailed into a violent storm, two waves broke over the ship, and seconds later it was being tossed around in the breakers, listing perilously. The fishing gear blocked the evacuation routes, there were no fire extinguishers on board and the crew fought to make their way to life rafts which never opened. At first the ships in the area did not respond to the distress signals. When the disaster was a fact and a vessel came to their rescue, 14 of the Amur’s crew had drowned or frozen to death. The survivors and the deceased were taken on board an illegal, Russian-registered vessel. The corpses were put in the cold storage room together with the toothfish. In Mauritius both the dead bodies and those of the crew who were ambulatory, were dumped on land without papers or explanation. The ship owner later told the next of kin that they were not entitled to any compensation, in that there were neither insurance policies nor proper employment contracts.
In the years from 1996 to 2003, as many as ten ships are believed to have disappeared on their way to the Southern Ocean. They were floating coffins which seldom incurred large losses for the ship owners if they were taken down by the breakers in the Antarctic. Or by the authorities. Any crew members who were arrested were abandoned and forgotten by the ship owners.
After the Uruguay-flagged pirate ship the Maya V was boarded and escorted to Australia with 200 tons of toothfish in the cold storage room, the crew were let off following the payment of an insignificant fine. But the shipmaster and the fishing captain stood trial. The 71-year-old shipmaster stated that he had had two heart surgeries, had a helpless and mentally ill son at home in Uruguay and only 20,000 dollars in his retirement fund. During the time he spent in prison, the Spanish fishing captain started showing signs of clinical depression and paranoia.
Instead of paying the bail for the shipmaster and the fishing captain, the ship owners lent out the money at 7 per cent interest. Also the Chilean crew felt that they’d been left holding the bag. They had to pay fines and airline tickets out of their own pocket and at home in Chile they brought charges against the company that recruited them, the fisheries company Pesca Cisne in Punta Arenas. The company was controlled by the González family of the tiny city of O Carballiño in the Spanish province of Galicia.3
“The Spanish operators could basically be described as downright cruel.”
The environmentalist Alistar Graham pronounced this judgement almost 20 years ago. Long before Interpol became involved in the search for the fishing pirates, Graham ran his own intelligence operation to find the owners behind the illegal toothfish vessels. From Hobart he operated the organization Isofish, the foremost objective of which was to expose companies and individuals who made their fortunes on “the white gold”. It all started when Graham, with his irrepressible chuckle and indubitable talent for raising hell, picked up on a rumour claiming that there was a fleet of illegal toothfish poaching vessels in Mauritius. In exchange for a substantial amount of money, an open bar and a rural hiding place he sent an acquaintance to Mauritius to spy on and infiltrate the pirate fleet. After having exposed the pirate toothfish fleet in Mauritius he continued to follow the trail all the way to Galicia.
“The ships are just steel. Every morning there was somebody who jumped out of bed and decided what the ships should do. They were the ones we were going to find,” Graham says from his “office” in Hobart, the pub and restaurant of the New
