Dead in the Water

INTRODUCTION
 
The oceans make the modern economy possible, providing the most convenient and affordable means to move the things we buy, sell, build, burn, eat, wear, and throw away. On any given day, sneakers stitched together in Cambodian sweatshops are packed into forty-foot containers, then winched by dockside cranes into ships bound for Europe, where they will line the shelves of big-box stores. Oil sucked from a 150-million-year-old deposit beneath the Saudi desert travels the aquatic highway of the Suez Canal, ultimately filling the tanks of Ford sedans in New Jersey. Iron ore gouged from the red earth of Western Australia is loaded into cavernous bulk carriers and shipped to China, where it s forged into the steel that frames Shanghai skyscrapers.
 
Without seaborne trade, there would be no smartphones, and no glass of red wine with dinner. Without tankers to distribute it cheaply and efficiently, there would be no economic way to extract much of the natural gas that heats our homes, nor the fuel that allows us to fly off on vacations and business trips. The evolution of the shipping business to enable this commerce is one of the most remarkable achievements of capitalism, a symphony of technical and financial innovations that have drastically reduced the cost, and increased the reliability, of long-distance trade.
 
Yet the industry s success has also, curiously, led it to become largely invisible. The world s greatest cities London, New York, Tokyo were once dominated by their ports, their streets crowded with the sailors and dockworkers who made them run. But as ever-larger vessels required ever-larger quays, and robotic cranes replaced longshoremen s brawn, the ports moved away, to obscure locales like Felixstowe and Port Elizabeth. Eventually the sailors also receded from view some made obsolete by automation, the rest pushed out by cheaper, less demanding workers from developing countries. Even more than power lines

Matthew Campbell is an award-winning reporter and editor for Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, covering major political and busi­ness stories across the Asia-Pacific region. He has reported from more than twenty countries on subjects including crime, terrorism, climate change, and public health.

Kit Chellel is a reporter at Bloomberg and a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. He has won numerous international prizes for his work, covering everything from Chinese state hackers and feuding hedge funds to shady Nigerian oil deals and Irish sectarian gangsters.

A Financial Times Business Book of the Year
An Economist Best Book of the Year
Winner CrimeCon's UK Book of the Year

"A rich story of fake piracy and a global conspiracy...On one level, Dead in the Water is a masterpiece of explanatory journalism...Campbell and Chellel report and explain it masterfully, giving us an account that is both enlightening and thoroughly engaging.
--Mark Bowden, The New York Times
 
Triumphant in part a well-written, well-paced thriller. But it is also a morality tale .At the heart of the story is at least one still unsolved murder Dead in the Water makes a compelling case that those handling Russian oligarchs riches are not the only ones overdue for a rethink.
--Robert Wright, The Financial Times

Dead in the Water tells a startling tale of fraud and impunity at sea exposes the dark, barnacle-encrusted goings-on beneath the shipping industry s waterline gripping.
--The Economist

In gripping style [Campbell and Chellel] not only explain an esoteric corner of the world economy but relish the juicy contrasts between the Latin-quoting English barristers and the thuggish ship salvagers, between the squeamish insurance men and the resolute ex-coppers."
--The Wall Street Journal

"Dead in the Water is an expertly constructed crime thriller the sort of work of narrative nonfiction that seems destined for a film adaptation. It is also an unexpected case study in the way that fraud has permeated the global economy, undermining democratic governance by both feeding off and facilitating government corruption."
--The New Republic

A jaw-dropping story that weaves its way, drone-like, through a dizzying variety of locales, from the deck of Brillante itself to the interior of a rusted Yemeni salvage tug to Lloyd s of London s 14-storey glass and mahogany atrium to the backstreets of Piraeus, Greece s shipping capital, and points in between. When an author (or