The Grandfather of White-Collar Piracy

 

In Greece, Max Hardberger posed as an interested buyer, in Haiti as a port official, in Trinidad, a shipper. He has plied guards with booze and distracted them with prostitutes; spooked port police officers with witch doctors and duped night watchmen into leaving their posts. His goal: to get on board a vessel he was trying to retrieve and race toward the 12-mile line where the high seas begin and local jurisdiction ends.

Hardberger runs a rare kind of repo service, extracting huge ships from foreign ports. His company is a last resort for shipowners whose vessels have been seized, often by bad actors, and over the years he’s built a reputation for taking the kinds of jobs others turn down. Hardberger’s specialty is infiltrating hostile territory and taking control of ships in whatever way he can – usually through subterfuge and stealth. Whatever part of the world his missions take him, Hardberger thrives in its gray areas. 

He handles the toughest of grab-and-dash jobs in foreign harbors, usually on behalf of banks, insurers or shipowners. A last-resort solution to a common predicament, he is called when a vessel has been stolen, its operators have defaulted on their mortgage or a ship has been fraudulently detained by local officials.

The public perception of modern piracy usually involves Somalis in fast-boats capturing tankers on the high seas. Of late, the Houthis launching from Yemen have revived global concern about attacks on merchant vessels and the global importance of maritime commerce since more than 90 percent of all products reach consumers by way of ships.

But the more common though overlooked threat at sea is white-collar piracy: schemes where ships get held captive in port through bureaucratic or administrative means. The pirates are actually different groups of mortgage lenders, lawyers, shipowners, or shipping companies, and they might be sitting in an office a half a world away from the ship. 

And sometimes when the ships are caught up in this kind of piracy, a repo man gets the call. This type of offshore crime and the role of maritime repo men is the subject of the fourth episode of The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season 2, during which a reporting team trailed Hardberger on an especially tough mission in Greece. The podcast is available on all major streaming platforms. 

Port scams are as old as shipping itself and seasoned repo men can identify them by name. “Unexpected complications”: a shipyard makes repairs without permission, then sends the owner an astronomical bill, often for more than the value of the ship, hoping to force its forfeiture. “Barratry”: buying off crews, sometimes paying more than a year’s wages to leave a ship’s keys and walk away. “A docking play”: a shipowner defaults on his mortgage, but is in cahoots with a marina, which charges the repossessor hyperinflated docking fees. Consumers are affected by the theft and corruption because it adds millions of dollars to transport costs and insurance rates, raising sticker prices more than 10 percent, maritime researchers say.

Tens of thousands of boats or ships are stolen around the world each year and are difficult to find on the vast oceans, the search is too expensive and the ships often end up in ports with uncooperative or corrupt officials. But when the boat or ship is more valuable, “repo men” like Hardberger are hired to find it. 

Most recoveries of stolen boats and maritime repossessions involve paperwork and banks and working with local law enforcement. But when negotiations fail, waterborne jailbreaks sometimes occur.

The moment that catapulted Hardberger into the spotlight came in 2004, when he took on an assignment in Haiti. The Maya Express case involved a ship whose mortgagee, seeking to reclaim owed funds, was unaware of its whereabouts. Turning to Hardberger and his team, they were tasked with tracking down the vessel. 

They found the Maya Express in Miraguan, Haiti, a small port village, and learned that a judicial auction was set to take place in just two days, threatening to complicate the repossession by auctioning off the vessel. “We had to do something in two days. We could not wait,” Hardberger told the Outlaw Ocean Project. 

So, accompanied by two armed SWAT agents, Hardberger approached the men guarding the Maya Express and offered $300 each for them to leave. With the guards out of the way, Hardberger and his team hitched the vessel to a tugboat and began the delicate task of cutting the anchor chains. “Unfortunately it was a full moon and not a cloud in the sky. The entire bay was lit up so people came running down from the hills to see what was going on,” Hardberger recalls.

Whenever onlookers came near the ship, the two armed men kept them on the dock and did not let anybody leave until the anchor chain was fully cut. Once the ship was free, the tugboat pulled the Maya Express into international waters and eventually toward the Bahamas. “It was the worst possible condition for an extraction but we managed to get it out,” Hardberger reflects.

All of the repo men The Outlaw Ocean Project talked to said they abide by certain self-imposed rules. No violence — better, they said, to hire street youths for lookouts, bar owners for diversions, and prostitutes to talk their way on board to spy. To talk his way on board, Mr. Hardberger said he has a collection of fake uniforms and official-sounding business cards, among them are “Port Inspector,” “Marine Surveyor” and “Internal Auditor.” He also carries a glass vial of magnetic powder to sprinkle on the hull to reveal lettering that has been welded off. Officials from the Haitian Coast Guard, Interpol, and the bar association in California, where Mr. Hardberger is licensed, said they had no records of complaints, disciplinary actions or arrest warrants for him.

Marcella Boehler is global publishing editor at The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington D.C. that produces investigative stories about human rights, environment and labor concerns on the two thirds of the planet covered by water. Season Two of The Outlaw Ocean Project's podcast series may be found here.