Graham had developed a sly technique for extracting the truth about the illegal fishermen. He knew that he was confronting large men who carried out difficult jobs in dangerous waters and who were away from home for long periods of time. Nonetheless he wanted to send them a message: I know where you are, where you live and what you are doing.
When Graham travelled to Galicia in the end of the 1990s, he took contact with the local newspapers and provided them with information about the fish poachers and his stories about them were circulated in the local community. Then he applied pressure on the stay-at-home wives, probed and asked questions about what their husbands were actually doing. At first a hellish commotion ensued, but little by little the wives and mothers started to talk. And some of the ship owners.
“One of the ship owners told me how he had learned the business from his father and that his eight-year-old son would take over the business. He was working from a modest office in Vigo. From there he could organize fishing operations all over the world. They were not concerned about whether they were fishing legally or illegally. They just went out and did it.”
“It was a hard game and no place for losers,” Graham states today.4
In the course of a few days everyone in Vigo, Galicia’s largest city and Europe’s largest fishing port, knew there was a stranger sniffing around in the city.
“One morning while I was eating breakfast at the hotel in Vigo, all of a sudden two bloody enormous guys appeared beside my table. They wanted to know what I was up to. I looked up at them and thought: I’ll never survive this. It was Florindo González and his brother,” Graham says.
It was the same Florindo González who was sued by the unhappy crew of the Maya V. And the same person the Spanish private detective “Luis” had identified as the owner of the Thunder.
The correspondence with the secret informants who spied on the pirate fleet for many years is in the files of COLTO – the coalition of legal toothfish operators. In an email from 2004 two men are listed as the two largest poachers in the Southern Ocean: Antonio Vidal Suárez and Florindo González.
“The main thing has been to get the interest and focus of Australian, US and Spanish authorities on catching ‘Mr Big’ of IUU-fishing, rather than focusing on the smaller people involved … What I want to ensure is that Vidal, and González do not get away with all their actions, which have made them millionaires over recent years.”
Twelve years after the letter was written, “Mr Big” is still at large.
51
THE SHOWDOWN
VIGO, OCTOBER 2016
He arrives at the agreed upon hour, leaves his all-weather jacket on the chair, stands by the window and looks out at the clouds drifting towards the city. For two days he has been talking about his life as a fisherman in the Southern Ocean. And about life on board the Thunder. We have agreed that the location of the meeting is to be kept secret.
“What are we going to talk about today?” he asks.
“The owner of the Thunder.”
At first he stalls and says that will cost us more. Then he starts to tell us about the man for whom he has worked for many years, and whom he calls simply “Floro”. The businessman Florindo González Corral from Galicia.
“The first ship he made a lot of money on was the Odin; on one of the trips to the Antarctic we brought in 480 tons of toothfish. With the profits from that fishing expedition he bought the Thunder. He has had at least five vessels. Sea Shepherd says that the Thunder has earned EUR 60 million, but it’s much more than that,” he begins.
“Florindo came to Singapore when we set out on the last trip. The luggage of one of the officers had been lost on the flight and Florindo paid for new clothes before we sailed south. He hired the Indonesian crew through a crewing agency in Jakarta, he just called and said: Send me 30 seamen. He treated them well and always brought them cigars when he met us at the quay. And he was also very concerned about the quality of the fish. ‘You know how I want it,’ he used to say to the head of the fish factory.”
“Every day at four or five o’clock in the afternoon, central European time, Florino or his right-hand man José Manuel Salgueiro, called the Thunder. When we were in the ice he said we had to make our way to international waters. He told us that the officers of the Thunder should be especially observant and post two watchstanders when they rounded the Cape of Good Hope. One day Captain Cataldo was instructed to turn the Thunder around and attack the Bob Barker. Then one of the officers exploded and screamed: ‘Floro can damn well come down here to crash with that damn Sea Shepherd ship himself, if that’s what he wants.’ Over the phone he often discussed which opportunities we had to get away and we talked about Angola, Papua New Guinea and Europe. But we didn’t have enough fuel to make it all the way to Europe. At one point these conversations came to an end or were just between him and Cataldo,” the seaman says.
“When they finally let us depart from São Tomé, we flew to Lisbon to be interviewed by the insurance company. Florindo, his brother and assistant showed up outside the hotel. They gave us instructions on what we should and shouldn’t say. That we must not mention toothfish and that the vessel was owned by a Singapore company. The majority did as they were told,” he says.
During the chaotic days following the wreck of the Thunder, an insurance claim arrived for more than EUR 7 million. For many years the Thunder was insured by the company British Marine. After the search
