Abduwali treated piracy like a business. He started with the essentials—stolen fast boats. Advanced weaponry was procured from Yemen, where he’d made contacts with international arms dealers. He parlayed his cut of his earnings into deposits with a known hawala dealer to procure the weapons. Then he’d make the trip to Puntland, Yemen, to complete the transactions.
Over time, his arsenal ranged from AK-47s to RPG-7s. Cases of hand grenades and tear gas were added over time. What set him apart from other pirating operations, however, was his self-taught internet expertise. He once quipped to his team—Google is my friend. He’d discovered virtually everything he needed to know about a piracy mission could be found on Google and elsewhere across the internet.
Abduwali was a planner. After achieving a modicum of success on smaller ships, he developed a team that undertook coordinated attacks on larger vessels. Despite the countermeasures and armed security employed by shipping companies in recent years, Abduwali was able to circumvent them and take control of the vessels. His payouts were in the multimillions.
In piracy circles, he was considered an oddity—a pirate with a conscience. He abhorred unnecessary killing and instilled the same beliefs in his men. To be sure, firefights ensued during the hostile taking of a ship, and lives were lost on both sides. But the security personnel engaged in the battle were viewed as enemy combatants and therefore fair game. He didn’t kill for the sake of killing. He forbade his men from taking women and raping them. As a result, over time, those who were asked to pay the hefty ransoms he commanded did so without escalating tensions on board their ships.
Then, during one attack, things went horribly out of control. One event tarnished his reputation so badly that the international community elevated him to one of the most wanted men on the planet.
The true facts were never made known because everyone who bore witness to the events leading to the massacre was dead except Abduwali. Nobody was interested in his version of events.
It was to be a one-boat, six-man operation. He’d been tracking a one-hundred-twenty-foot pleasure yacht sailing north along the east coast of Somalia. The occupants, a wealthy couple and their three teenage boys, had been posting photos and videos of their trip on social media.
The boarding of the vessel was relatively easy, with only one of his men suffering a superficial wound, and one of the vessel’s first mates accidentally shot himself in the leg. After the pirates gained control of the yacht, the family of five was gathered together on the bow and the crew of four was locked in a stateroom. In the space of just a few minutes, with Abduwali’s advance planning, the vessel was wholly under his control.
Several phone calls were made to the couple’s chief financial officer in an attempt to extort payment. The hostages, and the CFO, repeatedly denied their ability to pay the amount Abduwali sought. The pirate responded with facts to the contrary. He threw in their face all of the information found on their annual financial reports filed with the British government. He argued their philanthropic endeavors alone would cover the cost of the ransom he demanded. Yet the two men continued to argue their inability to pay.
Abduwali became increasingly frustrated, and his men sensed the same. On two occasions, the sons of the couple got mouthy with their Somalian captors. Words were exchanged, and then the boys received punishment in the form of pistol whippings.
Abduwali began to question if the CFO was stalling to give the Brit time to mount a rescue. Another call was placed. This time, he held a gun to the man’s head, but he never pulled the trigger despite the bloodbath that ensued.
The crew had suddenly appeared from below deck. They’d managed to escape the stateroom and kill the man assigned to guard them. All of them, including the injured crew member, emerged from two different ladders that led to the bow. Bullets began flying in all directions.
Abduwali never returned fire. The shooting startled him, and one of his men was shot right next to where he was standing. Abduwali lost his footing and fell behind the Zodiac parked on the bow. When the shooting stopped, everyone had been killed or were in the process of bleeding out on the once spotless white deck.
It took less than a minute to slaughter everyone on board in a fusillade of bullets. Abduwali fell to his knees, wiped his hands in the blood, and raised them high into the air, begging Allah for forgiveness. In a daze, he managed to find his way back to his boat and left for Mogadishu. By the time he arrived, the British special forces had arrived at the yacht and reported their findings to Whitehall, the British Secret Intelligence Service.
Abduwali was a wanted man, and the reward was ten million dollars.
He was able to escape into Yemen and, with a hefty payment, was provided false identification and a passport. His plan? Travel into Mexico and make his way into the United States, where he planned to blend in with the large Somalian population in the state of Minnesota.
Then his fate changed. During his travels, he’d perused many mercenary and soldier-for-hire websites out of curiosity. He never expected to find the functional equivalent of a help wanted ad for pirates, yet he did. Certainly, the language was veiled and coded. But as an experienced pirate, he got the gist of the ad.
He entered Mexico through Mexico City and then purchased a barely drivable car with cash. He drove to Monterey, the capital of Nuevo Leon in northeastern Mexico, for the job interview. During the trip, he conducted internet research on the employer by taking all known information available from the ad, followed by running down leads from the Google results.
Within a day, he’d determined the location
