We give a huge thanks to all our sources who came through for us in Spain. A special thanks goes to journalist Victor Honorato and María José Cornax from the environmental organization Oceana. Victor accompanied us on our first trip to Ribeira, knocked on doors and made uncomfortable phone calls. María answered all of our more or less intelligent questions about the pirate syndicates, Spanish bureaucracy and the Spanish authorities’ unwillingness to take any action against the fisheries mafia in Galicia – up until the moment when they moved in with the big guns in 2015, to a large degree thanks to the tireless efforts of María and Oceana.
Special thanks also go to Tor Glistrup, Eve de Coning and Gunnar Stølsvik in Norway who gave us our first introduction to the work of combating international fisheries crime.
We are particularly thankful to Alistair McDonnell from Interpol’s Project Scale and Glen Salmon at AFMA in Australia who guided us, dug through archives and answered questions as far as their job descriptions would permit.
We have travelled far and wide in conjunction with the work on this book, but the trip to São Tomé and Príncipe is the one we remember best. We thank our interpreter Alex and the untiring manager of Sweet Guest House. The same holds for the adventurous and newlywed couple Aleksandra Dorann and Olof Van Winden. What a party!
In Oslo, the team at Visualdays, along with Tore Namstad, Morten Haug Frøyen and Anne Walseth all deserve our thanks for their advice, encouragement and overall goodwill.
The captain of the Kunlun, Alberto Zavaleta Salas from Peru, also merits a particularly honourable mention. He was the only officer on the pirate vessels who was brave enough to be interviewed on the record.
We have saved our biggest thanks for last: Fernando Manuel Toledo Oregon, the fearless optimist who travelled with us to Latin America when the book project was on the brink of falling apart, who certainly saved us from being robbed in Valparaiso and whose resolve did not waver when we knocked on the door of “Mr. Big” in Galicia. Muchas gracias!
And to Anne Grete Arntzen, Hilde Andersen and our children: thank you for putting up with all our madness.
The writing of this book was made possible by funding from the Fritt Ord foundation and the Norwegian non-fiction writers association (NFF). We are incredibly fortunate to have you. Thank you.
We will conclude with a well-known phrase: this is a documentary in which we describe real-life events to the best of our abilities. Any errors, omissions or misunderstandings are not the fault of our sources, but wholly our responsibility as the authors.
Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Sæter Oslo, December 2016
NOTES
2 “THE BANDIT 6”
1 Industrialized illegal fishing for the Patagonian toothfish began on a large scale off the coast of Chile and Argentina around 1990. When the authorities tightened up control measures and quotas, the fleet of trawlers and longline fishing vessels moved towards the British overseas territory of South Georgia, where the fishing was very good. When they were being hunted by the British in the mid-1990s, many of the same stakeholders popped up, first around the South African Prince Edward Islands, and subsequently in the French southern territories of the Kerguelen and Crozet Islands and the Australian Heard and McDonald Islands. After they were chased away by South African, French and Australian authorities, respectively, the first vessels were observed in international waters near the ice edge of Antarctica in January 2002.
2 Descriptions of the chase, Peter Hammarstedt’s preparations and his thoughts along the way, are based on interviews with Hammarstedt carried out in Bremen in April 2015, Southampton in January 2016 and Stockholm in September 2016. Background materials also include numerous emails, telephone conversations and WhatsApp messages from January 2015 and up until the time when the book went to press, transcripts of dialogue, sound recordings made on the bridge of the Bob Barker and information from the Bob Barker’s ship’s log. The authors also spent two days with the crew on the Bob Barker when they arrived in Bremen on 27 April 2015. At that time the majority of the crew had been at sea since 3 December of the previous year.
3 The Thunder, Viking, Kunlun, Yongding, Songhua and Perlon have changed names multiple times in the course of recent years. When Hammarstedt made his “The Bandit 6” poster, the Kunlun, Yongding and Songhua had other names – respectively, the Chang Bai, Chengdu and Nihewan. In the text the authors have consistently chosen to refer to each ship by a single name. The names chosen are the names the ships had when they were being chased in the Antarctic in 2014/2015.
4 The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) is based in Hobart in Tasmania and manages the so-called krill convention, which went into effect in 1982 and is a part of the Antarctic Treaty System. Twenty-four nations and the EU are members of CCAMLR, which provides annual guidelines, advising on the amount of fish that can be harvested in the area.
5 Interpol operates with several types of wanted alerts, which they call notices. The latter can be red, blue, green, yellow, black, orange or purple, depending upon the information Interpol is requesting. A Purple Notice was issued for the Viking and the Thunder, in which Interpol and the nation ordering the notice requested information from Interpol’s 190 member nations about a specific modus operandi – how the criminals were operating and how they tried to conceal their violations of the law.
6 George Forster (1777): A Voyage Round the World.
7 In the USA and Canada, Patagonian toothfish is sold as Chilean Sea bass, which is completely misleading since the fish is not a sea bass, and
