“I had a conversation with them, but that doesn’t mean that I owned the ship. I have nothing to hide,” he says.
He has no explanation for why so many sources identify him as the owner of the Thunder, but tells us that he bought fish from the Thunder when the ship was called the Rubin and the Typhoon. He emphasizes that there was never any talk of poaching fish.
“I was in Mauritius when they were selling fish, but I haven’t bought fish from the ship in the past 12–13 years,” he says.
He reluctantly tells us about “Capitán Nemo” and José Manuel Salgueiro, the two who have been identified as his closest collaborators in the operation of the Thunder.
“José Manuel Salgueiro is retired and has been ill for three years. He’s depressed and is not in a financial position to own a ship. We worked together in Mexico, but that was a long time ago. ‘Capitán Nemo’ is an agent I had contact with. There are many people who know me, many seamen. If somebody asks me for help, I help out. But there are many other problems, Chinese who fish illegally with crews who are barely paid and never allowed to leave the ship. In Galicia we have problems with narcotics smuggling, perhaps the authorities and the police should have made that a priority instead,” he says and flicks the cigarillo across the sidewalk.
“But you know the story of the Thunder?”
“Yes. That hasn’t been a good story for me. The other day I was at a party in Vigo and everyone asked about the Thunder. It caused problems for me with the family. They saw my name on the Internet, especially my father. We have the same name,” he says.
The story that Florindo González Corral tells us on this golden afternoon is full of gaps. He also denies that he owned several of the old pirate vessels that witnesses and investigators have connected to him.
“In the end this will perhaps be a story I can tell my grandchildren,” he sighs.
“What will you tell your grandchildren?”
“I don’t know,” he answers curtly.
“The Indonesians on the Thunder say that you treat them well …”
“Ha ha ha ha.”
“We’d hoped you could tell us about all the conversations you had with Captain Cataldo?”
“I know that he’s a captain and that the boat was chased. Now I don’t think there are any boats from Galicia in the Antarctic any longer. Neither is there any market for illegal fish,” he says.
The twilight steals into O Carballiño, “don Florindo” looks at his watch, tosses the third burned down cigarillo onto the sidewalk and rests his hand on the wrought-iron picket fence.
“Let’s hope that this story will soon come to an end,” he says as his good-bye.
53
THE FINAL ACT
When the Thunder’s second engineer Luis Alfonso Morales Mardones came wandering into his home town of Valparaiso in Chile, he believed that the worst was over. The story of the wrecked pirate ship had sparked the interest of both the local media and the engineer’s vindictive ex-wife. Now he would have to pay off an old debt.
Mardones lived in a modest house on the ridge of a steep ravine in Cerro Cordillera, one of the hills surrounding the seaport on the Pacific shore. When we knocked on the door one spring day in 2016, the neighbours told us they hadn’t seen him in months. The only trace of Mardones was an article in a local paper. “The Story of a Pirate” was a character assassination carried out by his former wife. According to his ex-wife, Mardones had served 18 years in the Navy, but was kicked out when it became known that he’d initiated a relationship with a transsexual. After that dishonourable discharge, he signed up on a fishing vessel, subsequently became a pirate and boasted of the huge sums of money he earned on the Thunder. She was obliged to provide for herself and her children by working as a street clown, she explains.
Now her ex-husband was going to pay. After the article, Mardones disappeared from Valparaiso.
In September 2016 the Thunder’s Captain Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo came home to his fashionable apartment in the seaside resort of Viña del Mar outside Valparaiso. Cataldo and the two Spanish officers never had to serve their sentences in the São Tomé prison. Although they lost the appeal, they were allowed to leave the island without paying the fine of EUR 15 million. Their local ship agent Wilson Morais tells of how he was left to foot a substantial bill for rent and services he had carried out for the pirates. The shipping company suddenly stopped responding to his emails. The young public prosecutor Kelve Nobre de Carvalho had ambitions of following the money trail left by the Thunder, but the web of tax havens and dodgy flag states involved in the Thunder saga proved too complicated to penetrate. Instead, he sent a letter to authorities in Madrid requesting assistance in collecting the EUR 15 million fine from the ship owner. Asked by the authors who he identified as the ship owner, he named Florindo González.
The investigation against Florindo Gonzalez Corral is still ongoing.
“He is in the oven. Cooking slowly,” one of the investigators says.
Most of the crew of “The Bandit 6” ships were young and underpaid men from Java who were presumably puzzled by the fact that their officers so frequently wore ski masks. In March 2016, we are on the way to the province of Tegal to hear their stories from the Thunder’s last journey. While we are waiting in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, we are ambushed: A fight has broken out over the stories of those who lived in the very bottom of the Thunder. A research assistant at a university in New Zealand, Elyana Thenu, warns the crew of the Thunder against meeting us. And she does so by spreading a dose of lies that frightens the crew into silence.
“We have found out that one of them is a journalist,
