856: Ian Urbina | Maritime Misdeeds on the Outlaw Ocean

24:24And so they get damn big, 90 mile winds, 100 mile winds are pretty common and massive waves. So Drake's Passage is why it's where most ships sink historically, because it's insane down there. So that was epic to experience crossing Drake's Passage to get down to Antarctica. I was on a vessel that wasn't a sea-sleeve vessel. This was a highly automated, super clean, amazing ship. But it's this massive, weird Dickensian factory setting. There was a whole second deck was a, you know, kind of Willy Wonka kind of conveyor belt style factory where this six and a half, 10 foot fish, these monster fish that are ugly as sin.

25:03That's why they were renamed from toothfish to Chilean sea bass, you know, moves down this conveyor belt. And these guys with these massive knives are just like slicing and dicing. By the time it gets all the way to the end, it's just little squares. the reason I went there was there's this phenomena where the killer whales and minke whales in particular but also sperm whales have figured out that there's a sort of a floating diner and all you can eat diner in the form of these ships and when they are dragging a 40 mile line behind them to catch the toothfish and they let it sit and drag for a week and it fills up with half a million dollars worth of catch the minute they start pulling that line up to the ship the winch makes a certain sound and literally a dozen whales who have been following your ship the whole time go at it.

25:49And they rip into the line and eat virtually everything from the line. The whales have gotten smart and only started doing this in the last decade. And the captains throw dynamite, they fire shotguns, they try to poison, they've tried everything. But it's just, that's the story that most attracted me. It was like, this is crazy. There's a man versus animal war going on out there and the whales are winning. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ian Urbina. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell. Introducing your new Dell PC with the Intel Core Ultra Processor. It helps you handle a lot, even when your holiday to-do list gets to be a lot.

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26:49Be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, all these authors, thinkers, creators every single week, it is because of my network. I think that word is kind of gross. Networking as a word, as a term is kind of gross. This course is free. It's not schmoozy. It's not gross. It's over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. It's all about improving your relationship building skills and inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. Non-cringy, down to earth, not awkward, not cheesy. You're not going to feel weird doing it. It takes just a few minutes a day.

27:21And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So, hey, come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now back to Ian Urbina. I don't love the idea that a fisherman is trying to poison things as they're also reeling up my dinner. That seems not super safe. I mean, the shotgun pellet is a little worrisome, but the poisoning thing and the killing of orcas who are in their own water, eating their own sort of prey is also a little bit. Seems unfair. Seems unfair. Yeah. Wow. I can't, this is, that is crazy.

27:55That is an attractive story, except for the part about living on a ship that could get you killed and freezing to death in the water. That's why you're, that's why you have that job. And I sit here in my pajamas doing podcasts. the way you describe it is really wild. There was a, in the book, you mentioned you jumped into a skiff and the boat's moving, but the skiff, which is a small boat for those who don't know, is also moving in these waves and you can't stop the boats at this point in time. I can't remember why, but you can't just like stop and get in this thing and lower it. It's like, you're jumping in there, but if you fall overboard, you're totally dead.

28:26There's no way they can get you one, the boat's moving, but two, it's freezing and there's waves. I would never do, do you have kids? What are you thinking. Why would you do that? My wife actually feed you these lines. It just occurred to me. No, I mean, you're quite right. Like of the people are like, wow, it sounds so dangerous. Aren't those people going to kill you? And I'm like, actually, the two things that are most dangerous are exactly the thing. Ship transfer is insane and super dangerous and one wrong move and you're dead. And then infection, you know, on the really bad vessels, not the toothfish vessels, but the sea slave vessels that we're getting on rats and roaches.

29:01And you're there for weeks and And it's just so unhygienic that you can get really sick. But yeah, those ship transfers are sort of insane. And it's sort of, I mean, I just, in this current investigation, you don't want to stop the ship because on very high seas, if you stop a ship, things get way worse. It's like a bicycle, right? When you're in forward motion, you're actually moving less because you're cutting waves and the engine is keeping you at a steady momentum that's flat. But if you stop, if you were to cut your engine, now you're a ping pong in a bathtub and you're getting, or a washing machine, getting really tossed.

29:37So you never want to cut off your engines if you could avoid it. You don't even want to drop anchor if you could avoid it. So that's why if you're going to do a transfer, you want to be moving somewhat. But getting the synchronicity right between a small boat that's literally three stories down the steel side of you and you and you're going up and down and they're going up and down and trying to figure out when's the right moment to jump across, that's really risky. I'm cringing. And if you're watching the YouTube version, I'm sitting here like touching my face in a very anxious way, thinking about jumping down from a huge three story tall vessel.

30:08I can't. That's nightmare fuel, man. Your wife didn't need to feed me these lines. That's too much for me. I can't handle it. Do we know what percentage of fishing is illegal? Any idea? The number that gets bandied about is one in five. And that's a number that I can't remember who. 20 % of fishing is illegal? Yeah, 20 % of stuff that ends up on American plates is IUU is illegally caught. That probably means more then, right? Because if you're in the United States, which theoretically maybe kind of sort of cares about this, then what percentage of my fish, if I'm eating dinner in Cambodia, is legally caught?

30:44I don't know about that. That might even be more dodgy. Yeah, no, I think the number's gonna be, that's gonna be a very low-end floor. The other thing that makes it low end is the typical term is IUU, illegal, unregulated, unreported. So the U and the U refer to places where there just isn't law. So it's not officially illegal, but it's completely unsustainable. If you look at IUU and you look at other places that don't really care about trying to track their imports, then you're only going to go up from 20%. So fishing companies, abuses of workers, environmental policies, it seems like we just can't stop these repeat offenders.

31:20I know there's boats like the Sea Shepherd that will ram them and whatnot, which is, I mean, also illegal. But it's one of those where you're kind of like golf clap, right? You know, look, go get them. Nobody else is going to bother. Yes, it's illegal. And you're probably technically a terrorist, but we also get it. It seems like being on the inside of this, you have whistleblower issues, right? Because if you're a captain and you go, hey, my boss is asking me to do illegal stuff. Can you ever be a captain anywhere again in your whole life? Yeah. So in some instances, there are in some places in the world, there are requirements that there are fishery observers on board.

31:57And these are sort of third party players who are supposed to be there. Those observers are fishery observers. So they're focused on the fishing issues, not the labor issues. Right. And so they're looking at, are you going places you're not allowed to be? Are you using the wrong type of gear? Are you having bycatch? Are you targeting sharks that are protected species, etc.? they're looking at fishery issues, is your tonnage right to your quota, you know, all these sorts of things. And they're keeping a little binder. They are a guest in a hotel they don't own, right? So like those guys and women have to be pretty darn careful.

32:29And some fishery observers have been disappeared from vessels. It's a very dangerous line of work. Fishing is the world's most dangerous profession. But that's one thing that does exist. You know, there's a push for onboard cameras. And there are, you know, Sea Shepherd's got eight ships, you know, and Greenpeace has ships and there are. And then U.S. Coast Guard and other kind of coastal nations are increasingly trying to find ways to not just protect the security of their border, but also think about food security and not just in their waters, but other partner nations. You know, they're having a more holistic look at this issue.

33:05So key players are inching into the space. But again, like you said, you're a deckhand, you see some shady stuff go down, maybe you capture some cell phone footage, But like the evidentiary findings, what you have to prove is very weak if you can even find someone willing to do anything with it. It happened way over there way long ago with proof being this shaky cell phone footage. So it's a tough thing. And you might get blacklisted, as you say. Yeah. Speaking of shady stuff with cell phone footage, didn't you, was this in the book? Somebody had filmed like a murder of, I guess, crew members.

33:40What was that all about? Yeah. So this was a story that began, I sort of began investigating in 2015. I had gotten a video sent to me by a source at Interpol who knew I was interested in maritime crime. It's a 10 minute, 26 second long sort of slow motion slaughter captured on the cell phone. That cell phone had been found in the back of a taxi in Fiji by some random passenger and handed over to the police. The video shows this kind of situation on waters where it's unclear, but essentially some guys with semi-automatic weapons on what turned out to be a Taiwanese tuna longliner are doing target practice on these other guys in the water.

34:18The guys in the water are five that you see over the course of the video. They're all killed one by one headshots. And then the most shocking thing to me, at least, is at the end of the video, the way witnesses or the culprits, we don't know, but folks on deck of the shooters turn the camera on themselves and sort of celebrate for selfies and sort of party down and let the bloodletting. Gross. So that video was like really disturbing. And that began an eight year long investigation we did. And ultimately that led to a front page piece in the New York Times on the front end and then on the tail end, the front page piece in the Washington Post.

34:51And the captain of that vessel who ordered the killings was caught and arrested and is behind bars now. That's so gross. And also I want to highlight that the only reason they got them is because some idiot filmed it, turned the camera, filmed himself, then kept the video on his phone, then got drunk and left it in a cab. Then someone else found that, went through the phone, which I would never do if I found a frigging phone, found that, then had the sort of emotional intelligence to go, wow, this is a crime and probably an unprosecuted one, unresolved murder. I should turn this in. And then somebody else did something with it.

35:24I mean, it's like miracle after miracle. And then one guy goes to prison for this murder that probably happens all the, this type of murder that happens maybe all the time. Yeah. You're spot on by lining up all those and then, and then, and then. Yeah. And then the last then is in some ways the darkest and that the dude on the ship, who's probably not even making decisions himself. He's taking orders from on land. The copton goes to jail. So the private maritime security guys wielding the guns, their name never came out and they were never even questioned, much less charge. And now go to the opposite extreme.

35:56The owner of the fishing company is some big player in Taiwan, scot-free, you know, like, so no penalties, no fines, no prison time for the true beneficiary. The crappy captain probably is barely making ends meet. Now his life is ruined. He deserved to be behind bars, but, but you're right. You know, this is just not necessarily a full success story. It's just a fluke. Right. And you've got to be dumb enough to film your crime and then basically hand it over to prosecutors to even get this sort of, what do you call it, sacrificial lamb locked up. Right. That's it. I know you wrote about stowaways, and I was surprised to hear that this still exists.

36:31Who is stowing away now? It sounds like something you see in a pirate cartoon. What's amazing is there are a couple of key locations, especially in Africa, but other places too. And one of them is in South Africa and Cape Town, and it's a specific port. Why it's a magnet for stowaways, I don't know. But that it is, is for sure because we actually embedded a videographer and two videographers to live with these guys for a long time. And for, I think, going on four weeks, our folks were living in this shantytown where everyone there was stowing away. They were right next to the port and they knew how to get to the port and they were watching for key ships to roll into Cape Town and then sneak through the fence.

37:10And 90 % of these guys are from Tanzania. I've never gotten an answer of why so many Tanzanias do this as opposed to other countries. But bottom line is, it's sort of a roll of the dice. It's an adventure. It's a bragging rights chance to sort of go someplace else, anywhere else that might be better. And they don't know typically where that ship is headed when they get on board. They just sort of know that it's a big ship and they think they know how they can get on board. And it looks like it's going to go someplace else. So we looked at one show in particular who he and his buddy, it didn't go so well.

37:45They got rafted. They got put on a raft once they were at sea by the crew and sort of left in the middle of the ocean to die. What? Oh, that's a whole nother nightmare. So they find you, what, in the engine room or something, and they're like, well, we can't keep these guys in the boat. So they put you in a lifeboat and they just cut you loose? Yeah. And in this case, it's sort of like from the perspective of those who do it, like in this case, there's a ship called the Donna Liberta. These are two Tanzanians. And they discovered the guys. They locked them down. The captain told the crew, build a raft.

38:16Oil drums on some tabletop. No handles. Oh, my God. They put that in the water. They marched the guys up, knife point, say, climb down, get on the raft. They cut the thing. Why they do it is partially, they don't want to, in this instance, they don't want to kill the guys. Because that just feels maybe a step further than they want to go ethically. I would rather get killed than left out in the ocean to roast to death and dehydrate and then die. Thanks anyway. Well, these guys, and that's exactly what happened to one of the two. I mean, and so they cut them loose. There's a storm on the horizon.

38:43They were like about eight miles from land. So they thought, well, the currents will push them to land. But we won't, we, the captain of the Don Lavera, we won't pay the fine for having rolled in with folks that aren't supposed to be on ship because that's going to be a delay and a fine and I might get fired. So I'm not going to take that heat for these guys. But on the other hand, I don't want to kill them. I don't want to slip their throat. So let's put them on a raft and hope for the best. So that's what they did with these guys. as they drifted around, those guys eventually washed up on Liberian shores.

39:11One of them died within the hour, and the other survived, and we ended up finding him and built a story around his story. That's truly terrible. Why does it cost money if you roll in? It seems like that's backwards. Hey, this guy stowed away on our ship. Maybe he gets arrested and deported, but not like, oh, now you have to pay for it? That seems dumb. Yeah, I mean, post 9-11, everyone, the world got scared, right? And around the same time, the sort of anti-immigration, anti-migrant thing was kicking up. And those two things together resulted in the port fronts being higher fences, more penalties if you roll in with folks that aren't supposed to be on your ship.

39:49So everyone was like super security conscious. And the U.S. pushed a lot of these rules on other ports because if you're going to let stuff come into our ports, we don't want a dirty bomb on there. We don't want undocumented immigrants on your ship. And you guys have to sweep your ship before you go to shore. And if you don't, you pay the price. so the fine structure went way up and that fine goes to companies companies drifts out you know puts the pressure on captains captains turns to crew and when the ship's about to leave cape town captain turns to crew and says it's coming out of your wage if you don't sweep the ship property and if there are any stowaways that pop up a week later that's on you so you guys better sweep the ship really well these are huge ships so two football field size ships so you can hide anywhere and so guys slip through all the time and then this is why you know people everyone gets all scared that they're going to get hit with charges for illegal immigration.

40:35They're going to hit with fines. Oh my God. I mean, I can understand the temptation to punch someone in the face if they stow away on your ship or feed them poorly, but I can't really, I can't justify letting them slow, die a slow, painful death. I mean, look, they're economic migrants or something like that, I guess, but man, that just seems, it seems so backwards. I know that there are anti-stowaway companies that can take them off? How do these companies work? This is a very unique niche that I, you know, speaking of things you never know exist. Yeah, I mean, those companies are hired by the wealthier shippers.

41:12And it's often built into maybe your high, your premium insurance package. And the insurance package says, okay, if we're going to insure you guys, you got to have this company sweep your ships whenever you roll into this list of ports because there's no stowaway activity. So then these guys fly in and they handle the sweeping. But they also, more interestingly to me, at least, is they handle the crisis management after if someone slips through. And what that means is these companies, you call and someone snuck by, he's on my ship, what do I do? Bossman calls the contractor. Contractor says, I'll fly a couple of guys who got language specialties to X and we'll meet you there.

41:50And those guys handle the stowaway and they know all the tricks of the trade. Because the stowaway will do what a lot of migrants will do and you and I would do the same. You strip all your national identity, your name, anything, so that you can't be sent back home. They don't know where you're from. You then become an easier refugee if you can claim you're from Sudan, but you're actually from Liberia or whatever. So these companies come in and they try to troubleshoot the situation and they actually escort the stowaway to the airport and fly them all the way back home. And they handle all the crisis so that that ship can quicker get out of port and your company doesn't have to deal with it.

42:24If delays are that expensive, I would assume there's a whole sub economy out there of people who find ways to delay ships and basically extort them so they can go about their business. Is that a thing that happens? Yeah, it's why you have a maritime repo industry. So delays all the way down to lockdowns are this true phenomena where a huge number of ports are sort of rife with really corrupt, shady characters. And some of them are local judges and port officials. And they may hit you with some, you know,$5 million fine because you bumped a pier and your ship's worth a million. You know, so they're like, you're just trying to steal my ship through white collar means.

42:59And that's where you hire repo men and the repo men fly in and they start with kind of soft power. You know, they sit down and say, look, you know, can I get you a case of Jack Daniels and 20K? You know, let's work this out. You know, this is kind of crazy. And if that doesn't work, then they do extractions. And that means they assemble a team and they basically steal the ship back out to sea and they steal it in the middle of the night. And we went, I went on a couple of repos with these guys and they were doing just that. And it's pretty insane stuff. I would have a person like that on my show to talk about stealing.

43:29I mean, repossession lawfully ships. That would be a hell of a podcast. I think too. You know anybody like that? I've got the guy for you. Yeah. I mean, the guy is, yeah. Max Hardberger. His name is straight out of his name. Literally Max Hardberger. He lives in a trailer in Alabama and he's an amazing interview and he's, yeah. So I'll send him your way. Yeah, that would be great. And it's so funny that he lives in a trailer in Alabama, but he's probably a millionaire from repossessing ships, but he doesn't need a, doesn't need a big house. Always on the ocean. No, exactly. He's, he's a good old country boy and he just likes a good time.

44:00And I think he's never got more than, you know, 2000 bucks in his account. He burns through the rest. Yeah. The officials in corrupt country or corrupt officials delaying boats. How much does it cost to have, I don't know, a fishing boat and oil tanker stuck in a port for a day that should already be gone with its load? Do you know? Well, we're talking like 20 to 50 ,000 a day if we're talking about a container ship. Ship that's got multi-million dollar cargo, so grain, oil, the contracts are often built with penalty structures for delays that are lofty. Because there's a spot market that predicts when the stuff's supposed to arrive and when it gets on the market.

44:40And if you kick that back. But the smaller ships, it's all relative, right? 20 ,000 a day to Marisk is pocket change. but$20 ,000 a day to a fishing vessel, that could put them out of business with a two-week delay. This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ian Urbina. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other considerate and smart, intelligent listeners do, and I'm sure you fall into that bucket. Take a moment and support one of our amazing sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

45:15You can also ask our almost super smart AI chatbot and getting smarter every day AI chatbot on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash AI. Thanks for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Ian Urbina. So do people steal ships? I don't mean repossessing the ship. I mean, actually hijacking the ship for ransom, like Somali pirates kind of, but actual ship theft where they use the boat. If it's open ocean and it's totally lawless, why not just steal a boat and then use it and make money with that for the rest of the life of the boat? So one, you know, lexicon issue, boat versus ship.

45:54A boat can go on a ship. A ship can't go on a boat. So that's the simple way to remember the two words. And so boats like cigarette liner yachts down in Florida are stolen to an insane degree. Most of the boat thefts in the U.S. occur out of Florida and they're stolen for the sake of people moving in drug trafficking and they get taken out of Florida down to the Caribbean or Columbia or wherever and Venezuela. And so there's a lot of, in the US, boat fievery for a very specific purpose. Now, ship fievery globally, yes, for sure happens. Often it's various scenarios. One is, you know, off the coast of Nigeria, off the coast of Somalia on the other side of the continent, they steal a large vessel and they dual purpose it.

46:37One, they take the guys and all their goods. They sell the ransom on the guys and sell the goods. But then they have a boat that's pretty strong. And they use that as a mothership for quick hit other hits, where they have smaller boats that are usually de-housed. These are fishing boats that are outboard motors. They're not real strong and powerful. And they can't hold a lot of fuel. So now they have a base of operations because they stole some big fishing vessel. And they park it way out there in the avenue. And then they live there. And then they have a bunch of small boats. And when they see folks rolling through their neighborhood, if you will, they jump in the small boats and they chase the guys.

47:12And then if they catch them, then they got another mothership or they've got something to ransom. That is wild. Are the ships to go fishing or is it like we're just stealing it for ransom? Maybe they do somewhere in the world. Not that I know of. I don't know any stories. Okay. I was just curious. Yeah. Because it just seems to me if you can steal anything and use it with impunity and no one's going to come after you, I'm stealing a fishing boat and then I'm going to enslave a crew because why pay for anything, right? Yeah. I mean, the scenario where fishing boats might get stolen are more your white collar scenario where an amazing fishing vessel comes into dock, it unloads its cargo.

47:44Your cousin's the local judge and your brother is the port captain. You scheme up some scenario to lock it down. You bankrupt those guys. You kick them out of your country. And then now you officially can flip that ship, resell it for 50 bucks. And now your brother's got a kick-ass fishing vessel. And maybe he knows how to fish, But that's like a triple bank shot and pull. There are a lot of easier straight shots, if you will. One thing that amazed me was some companies just abandoning entire boats and ships, sometimes even with the crew aboard, because the company goes bankrupt. How is that possible?

48:17How do you just go, hey, we don't have enough fuel to get you home. Good luck, guys. And they're floating. How is that possible? It's a huge problem. It's a slow motion crime and tragedy. And so it gets very little coverage considering how common it is. because the crime is against the guys on board. They're stuck there. They have no way to get off. They have no way to get home. They don't have papers. They don't have cell reception anymore. Their family thinks they're dead. They're gone for a year and they're stuck. They don't have food, water. It's serious. Guys die, go crazy. How it happens is you're an owner of a fleet and one of your fleet is old.

48:51It's barely going to make it another year. It's not covering its costs, right? Your upkeep and your repairs are outweighing its catch. And then something happens. the final thing breaks, you know, and your mechanic says that's going to cost more than the ship is worth. And that's when you make a calculation or someone sues you and you're like, oh, wow, we're going to, we need to declare bankruptcy and walk away. Or someone buys you and you're like, okay, we need to sell it. And then the new guy comes in and he's a cutthroat and he's like, ah, I'm just going to, I'm not even going to play with those dudes anymore.

49:22The fifth ship, we're just going to leave it wherever it is, Fiji. I don't care, walk away from it. And so because of the way that maritime works and the way that ownership structures are sort of a Russian doll, it's like shells upon shells upon shells. It's sort of a paperwork exercise to disconnect yourself with the ownership. And it's not that hard to just sort of dump it wherever it is and walk away. And if there are guys on board, you dump them too. And that's when they are desperate. So what do they do? Are they literally out at sea and they're just stuck there? Usually they're close to shore.

49:55You know, most of these cases happen. Well, they pop up on my radar or the radar of all these seafarer do-gooder organizations, mission to seafarers, and when they get near to shore. But oftentimes that's because the guy who's running the ship and his crew of 20, he's calling and they're not picking up the phone. And he's like, hey, where are we supposed to go next? What's going? There's such and such broke. What do you want us to do about it? Which part should we take it in? Are you going to free up the budget to get it fixed, et cetera? And no one's answering their calls. So time passes, rations drop, fuel drops.

50:25He starts having to make decisions on his own. He's like, we got to get out of the sea and get near shore, even if we can't get all the way in port. So they come five, six, 12 miles from shore and drop anchor because it's a little bit safer for them. They can't get off the ship because they don't have papers. So usually when these cases pop up, they're right near shore, but in some godforsaken place where no one's really willing to help them. And that's when the network of folks who troubleshoot these cases get involved, raise the money, fly the guys home, get the government to play ball. But the companies just are long since gone and walk away.

50:57Yeah, oh my gosh, I can't even imagine. Because I would, I mean, if I could see land, I would just, at some point, I have to jump off the boat, right? I'm dehydrated, I'm starving to death, there's rats everywhere, whatever. Or maybe I ate them all. I'm not even trying to be funny. I mean, I guess that's what you do, right? And you just try to swim for it. Oh, it's so horrible. People do that, yeah. it's not rare to hear cases of drowning and they were 500 meters from shore because they don't know how to swim and they got so desperate they just jumped over and tried to flail their way. That's truly horrible.

51:24A lot of this is truly horrible. And people think, oh, in the intro, when you said this is the bottom of humanity, some people thought I was exaggerating, but this is what I'm talking about. I mean, this is just really, really disgusting. The sea slavery stuff, really disturbing, as we talked about before. How do those people get recruited for this? Do you know how they end up on the boat? What happens before they end up on the boat, I guess, is what I'm asking. A typical story, and not to beat up on the South China Sea or Thailand, but imagine this model wherever, right? So in the case of that area, you've got Thailand, which is a middle class country, less than 2 % unemployment, and it's surrounded by a bunch of countries that are a wreck, right?

51:59So Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, much poorer countries, often serious ethnic violence. So now you're a 22-year-old guy who lives in some village in Cambodia. You don't know anything about how you might feed your three siblings. The rice paddies aren't doing it for you. And you meet someone one day at some whatever festival or the local bar. And he's like, look, I can get you a job in Thailand in construction. Okay, now you light up because you know construction can pay, and especially Thai wages. You could earn in a year enough to keep your family afloat for five years. So you're like, yeah, it sounds great, but I don't have any money to get into Thailand.

52:35He's like, don't worry about that. Meet me on this location on Sunday, et cetera, and just become ready. You jump in the back of the truck. You show up on Sunday. You start this long journey illicitly across the border. He pays off that guy at the border. He pays off the next guy. Suddenly, two weeks later, you got maybe 20 other guys with you in the truck. And now you're at the port and you're wondering, where's the construction job? And next thing you know, those guys are muscled up. They got guns. You saw them beat up some dude in front of you the other night. They're not messing around. And they said, get on the vessel.

53:04And you get on the vessel and off you go to sea. That is a very typical story. You thought you were going in for one thing. You willingly signed on. You were going to be debt bonded in the first place. And now you're just captive and debt bonded. And off you go. And next thing you know, you're there for two years. This is kind of the story of all human trafficking, right? You reply to a job ad. You show up and you end up working in a scam call center or on a boat. And you're just like, I thought I was going to be a tour guide for what I thought was going to be building houses or whatever. Oh, man.

53:33A nanny. Yeah, the women in these cases are like, look, you can be a domestic. You're cleaning houses and taking care of the kids. No, no, you're going to a brothel and you're not going to realize that two weeks in. And you're a little, you know, small villager. You're not savvy to the ways of the world. You're not watching TV and surfing the internet and learning these stories. So you're just like, oh, that sounds good. And off you go. And next thing you know, you're in some horrible place. I heard that the karaoke bars slash brothels have some weird role where guys get into debt and they're kind of living there.

54:00Tell me about that. Yeah, so Renong, you know, went to this border town in Thailand right along the border. And yeah, very dark kind of ring of hell where the karaoke bars, which are downstairs a bar and upstairs a brothel, are all worked by the very migrants that have been trafficked. And the women and girls, and a lot of them are girls, like 12-year-old girls are upstairs. and the men who are from the same villages often are sort of told to stay there because the truck is leaving in three days to just kill some time. What they don't realize is that carousing at the bar and partaking of the girls is running up a tab.

54:40They thought it was sort of a, I don't know, a freebie, you know, or maybe she liked me or whatever. There was no money exchange. They didn't realize this was transactional. Lo and behold, they find out maybe, you know, when they get to the port that, oh, by the way, you owe X amount, which is like six months of wages because of what you did at the brothel. And the girls are there against their will and the guys are there against their will. And they're being leveraged against each other to sort of be entrapped, both of them even deeper. It's really dark. That's super dark. Oh, my God. That's really, truly awful.

55:13Tell me about these prison islands. This is something that I hadn't quite. Again, let's dive deeper into the dark I mean, this is even worse. And I feel bad I'm taking people down this journey, but I think it's important people know about this stuff because we're eating cheap seafood because of this. Okay, so the seminal work on prison islands is really done by the AP. They want a Pulitzer for it. And sort of the name that people know is a place called Bengina. And it was known before by journalists that a common tactic for ensuring that your labor doesn't run away is to drop them off on an atoll or some obscure island.

55:45Maybe you got guys there who will keep an eye on those workers. Maybe you don't, but it's so remote that they're not going anywhere. But you drop them off because maybe you have to bring the port into a bigger city dock and you don't want to run the risk. You got to fix something. The captain wants a night out at the brothel, whatever. But you don't want to bring all your workers into port because you might lose them. So you drop them off on one of these islands. Benjino was one of those islands and AP found it and revealed, you know, these guys were in actual prison cells on this island. That was a court, it was not a state run, you know, facility.

56:15This was just and these were captive workers who were being held there so that they could be redeployed on other vessels from the same company or dispatch other. So, again, these things are hard to believe that they exist, but they exist. So essentially, you drop your crew off in the middle of nowhere on a deserted island and somebody is feeding them and giving them water while you take the boat into the situation where these guys might have escaped. And at that point, they're glad to get back on the boat because otherwise they're going to rot to death on this deserted island. Oh, my God. I was going to ask about oil dumping and dumping waste, you know, cruise lines and things like that.

56:51That's not even the appetizer for what we're talking about with the slavery and the depravity here. Yeah, the human stuff is pretty intense. Again, the seafair abandonment, the slow motion mental health like ruin of that stuff, not to mention the acute like murder and rape and slavery is shocking. And again, these crimes often hand in glove connect in that, you know, a lot of the vessels that are engaging in the most egregious and repeat illegal fishing also just happen to be engaged in these other things. Why? Because of the finances. They're cutting corners. It's not because, I mean, yeah, there might be evil people out there, but that's not motivation enough or sustainable.

57:30It's really like an economic reality, which requires end of life vessels and companies to try to cut corners extra deep. And this is what that looks like. Tell me about the cruise line, the magic pipe. Tell me about magic pipes. The magic pipe is a term to refer to what, in essence, is sort of a tube that goes from here to there in the engine room. Oftentimes, they're maybe four or five feet long, and it's a redirect, right? So the really dirty stuff on a ship is the sludge. It's the sediment that remains from the dirty oil that ships use, black oil. and it's gray water, poop and pee and, you know, food mass, all that stuff condenses down into this nasty stuff that you cannot dump at sea.

58:17It's really toxic. And you have to hold onto it and bring it back to a processing plant on shore. But that takes time. It costs a lot of money, et cetera. So the way to deal with that is run a magic pipe and a magic pipe essentially redirects that stuff out of the container, out of the storage tank into the bottom of the ocean. And so it's like a hidden pipe underneath the vessel and you just flush it and you're flushing it as you go. You know, more ships dump intentionally. A lot of ink has been spread on the BP and the Exxon Valdez spills. You know, those are accidents, you know, terrible accidents and avoidable accidents.

58:53But intentional dumping of oil is more than the Valdez and the BP spill combined. Every three years, ships globally intentionally dump more oil than those two spills combined. So it's a really deep, overlooked problem. I didn't realize the quantity was that high. And I suppose we find out about this from whistleblowers who go, why is there a pipe that goes from this down to here when it's supposed to be in this holding tank? Or why is our holding tank empty? We've been at sea for a month. That kind of thing. Yeah, whistleblowers on board and then also satellite whiz bangs. You know, there's an amazing outfit called Sky Truth that's pioneered this stuff.

59:27And they're looking, using satellites to look at, you know, streaks on the ocean. These streaks that are left behind the ships, you know, can show up on satellites and they last for 40 miles. And if you know what you're doing, you can figure out, wait, so that streak lasts for 40 miles. What ships were on that trajectory 20 hours ago? And then they connect the dots and like, okay, that ship caused that streak and that streak is not an accident. That's them dumping. Now let's figure out how we can catch up with that ship. And that's the other way that these guys get caught sometimes. It's just crazy.

59:55It seems like it's not just about the economy though. I know that South China sea fishing has some sort of political sea claim kind of thing going on? In the last sort of five minutes, can you tell us about that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of places on the planet, again, for the reasons we talked about before, like the sea and the high seas, especially are this weird space where it's not clear who owns them and who polices them. And some places that are national waters from the shore to 200 out are claimed, but there are a lot of places where different countries claim the same territory.

1:00:26And so in the case of the South China Sea, one of the hottest zones around, a bunch of different countries have claimed certain patches and certain atolls, certain little plops of land. And so it's a real contested area. And China is the big dog in that area and so big that they are building islands. If you have an island that is yours, you now have the ocean 200 miles out from it. So if you plop an island out in one spot that's connected, then you've just expanded. It's a kind of territorial expansion. So on the South China to see you've got a lot of ships staring each other down and blocking each other.

1:01:02And often that those fights play out with fishing vessels. So there's proxy fights between big nations that are happening in clashes between fishing vessels. That to me shouldn't be surprising after everything we've just talked about. But it does seem odd that you can be like, well, we fish here. So this is now our territory, even though the map says differently. Yeah. I mean, maps are based in time, right? So when are you going to start your legal story? you're a lawyer so you know this like precedent yeah so if you're like look we've got historical precedent going back 200 years my guys have been fishing this so there's you know possessions nine-tenths of the law and we've been possessing this zone for a long time so it's really ours and that's creating facts on the ground what various countries are trying to do especially china these days and the more recent players are like no no we've been here for the last 40 years and like it doesn't matter we've been here for the last 600 and you're like yeah but not actually fishing and that's how i'm trying to see you have 250 chinese fishing vessels they don't fish they never put nets in the water.

1:01:56They're paid by the Chinese government to occupy. And they're fishing vessels officially, but they're civilian militia vessels, and they're just trying to create precedent. Look, people are going to ask me, and I know you got to go, is there any way for us to avoid seafood that is caught using slavery or crazy environmental violations? We've seen, I've heard of greenwashing where they put the seal on, but it's just some, they just made the organization and gave themselves the award for clean, sustainable seafood. We know that's bullshit. Is there anything that's not? Yes and no is my best answer.

1:02:25I think that there's a spectrum and to move closer towards the better end would be to say, I think seafood that's caught, processed locally is always going to be a safer bet, not because we're superior in our ethics, but because the longer that supply chain gets, the murkier it gets and the less accountability there is in it. So it might be more expensive, but it's probably going to be less likely to have all these crimes in it. Ian Urbina, thank you very much, man. I really appreciate your time. And you have definitely done the firsthand research. So I appreciate that. I think a lot of us do.

1:02:56And I'm sure you've got some smells that you still can't get rid of from as a result of that research. In my very core. Yeah. Thank you so much. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, here's what you can check out next on the Jordan Harbinger show. You're in Somalia trying to track down pirate gangs. And I'd love to kind of hear what this felt like. We went with a big security team and we paid the security team a lot of money. And And it was this one portion of a clan in central Somalia that was supposed to protect us. So how did they get you? My partner Ashwin flew off to Mogadishu.

1:03:35I drove him to the airport and then we saw him off. He got on the plane safely. And then on the way back from the airport, back into town towards our hotel, there was actually a truck waiting for us. It was a truck with a cannon welded in the back. These are very common trucks. They're called technicals. At first, we thought it was there to watch over us or protect us or something. But actually it stopped our car and 12 gunmen from the flatbed came over to my side of the car. And they actually fired in the air and then opened the door and tore me out of the car. They were waiting for me and they were probably waiting or hoping for both of us.

1:04:08I think they were a little bit disappointed that there was only one journalist. They beat me. They broke my glasses and I was wearing glasses at the time. And they had another car waiting and they bundled me into it and off we drove into the bush. For about three hours, something like that. hard to keep track of time. But at some point we stopped. They blindfolded me and they took me a few steps over to a mattress. So there was a mattress waiting for me in the middle of nowhere. There were other people there, other guards and other hostages. And I sat down for the next two years and eight months.

1:04:39I was a hostage. For more on life and captivity under the thumb of Somali pirates and how he made it out, check out episode 115 with Michael Scott Moore here on the Jordan Harbinger show. Before I forget the ship flagging shipping episode, other crime on the high seas episode was episode seven 39. The greenwashing episode that I mentioned earlier in the show was episode 599, man, so much. We didn't even get to, I heard about shark finning. I know that Ian has done work on this really gross. The amount of sharks that die as a result, the effect on the ecosystem, something like 90 million dead sharks per year because this superstitious bullshit, it.

1:05:18Really disappointing. Come on, humanity, get it together. And the sailors that die out there or slaves that die out there, antiquated laws limit damages for dead sailors. Because when the laws were drafted hundreds of years ago, in some cases, death at sea, it was seen as an act of God. So it was unavoidable. The shipping company couldn't possibly be held liable. It's an act of God. It's not because they have no safety equipment. They're being worked to the bone. they have no proper food, medical care, et cetera. It couldn't be that. It's gotta be an act of God. So nowadays, obviously we have tons of safety equipment and procedures.

1:05:52So if companies don't follow them, they should definitely be held liable. But lo and behold, governments are not really keen on catching up because having no laws and having no jurisdiction is kind of a convenient way to wash your hands of the whole thing. A lot of ship scams, a lot of fraud. We talked about that in episode 739, which I mentioned. That's Matthew Campbell, insurance fraud. A lot of sea-based fraud, fake scuttling where you destroy your own ship, fuel scams, stealing ships. I'm going to be doing a show in a few months here with a guy who steals ships for a living. That's going to be pretty damn interesting.

1:06:24I promise you that. Unfortunately here, a lot of the slavery stuff, I just don't see a positive outcome happening with this. A lot of times the slaves are rescued by police and then sold to another captain because they can and they can make money and they're rescued by police in a country that also doesn't doesn't value human life. And they're not from that country. It's just a huge shame. Some of the slaves that Ian talks about in the book had crazy medical ailments, stuff you haven't seen mostly in modern history or stuff you can only get when there's 30 people in a space for six guys eating gruel every day and don't get proper medical care with tons of pests on the ship.

1:07:04I mean, just really, really disgusting stuff that I won't go into here. A lot of you eat when you listen to the show. We just don't need that level of detail. Just imagine what it's like on a boat with sick people, no hygiene, not enough water. Just close your eyes and imagine the smell. But at the end of the day, we're all a little complicit, right? Because a lot of what these shady companies do is help international customers like you and me put food on our plate. Slave labor, unfair contracts on the open seas result in us getting our cheap ass tuna and sushi. And it's all plausible deniability for those further up the supply chain.

1:07:40So keep that in mind. Look, I love sushi. I love fish, but it is hard to eat that stuff without thinking and wondering what poor SOB had to catch it. And I like to think I'm paying for sustainable stuff, but you just never know. All things Ian Urbino will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or just ask our AI chatbot. Transcripts in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support this show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. I've said it once, but I'll say it again. Please consider supporting those who support this show. And yes, newsletter. Many of you have given me great feedback.

1:08:15We've used it to modify the newsletter. It's an evolving project. I'm loving doing it so far. I take some of those popular episodes of the show going all the way back, years and years, and I will grab the best takeaways from that, reanalyze the episode, and deliver it in a few paragraphs. JordanHarbinger.com slash news. Would love your feedback on that. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well. Also at JordanHarbinger.com slash course. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or connect with me right there on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

1:08:52Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's into international crime, shipping, high seas stuff, boats, whatever, or share this episode with him. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.